Speaker 1: Kalarogu Shock Media.
Speaker 2: Hey there, I'm Johnny Mack, and on Saturdays this summer,
I'm doing deeper dives on single topics. Today, let's talk
a little about Joe Rogan. And the thing that gets
lost in every conversation about Joe Rogan is that he's
a comedian, that was a comedian, is a comedian. Now
you might not think he's the best comedian. Maybe he's not,
but he's a comedian. The way he runs the podcast,
the way he talks to guests, the way he thinks
about things, the way he's built the whole thing. It's
all shaped by being a comedian. And what I mean
by that is his whole career was shaped by being
in rooms. We're the only thing that matters is whether
something's actually interesting or actually funny. You can't fully understand
the Joe Rogan experience without understanding that the person at
the center of the Joe Rogan experience thinks like a comedian,
which means he thinks about authenticity the way most media
executives think about ratings, which is to say, it's the
only metric that actually matters to him. And a lot
of times those two things are in opposition. TV never
quite figured out what to do with Rogan. He did
News Radio, remember that. Yeah, it's a funny show. People
remember it fondly. He was good in it, but he's
not the thing you think about when you think about
news radio. He was a comedian doing TV rather than
a TV person. Then he did Fear Factor. It's its
own strange chapter, a show that was watched by tens
of millions of people, made him a household name in
a very specific way. Fear Factor, Joe Rogan and Joe
Rogan experienced Joe Rogan are the same person if you
look closely enough. But the mainstream audience that knew him
from Fear Factor had no reason to think he was
going to become the most influential media property in the
next two decades. Joe Rogan was the guy who made
people eat bugs.
Speaker 3: This is so wrong. Come on, this is for your charity.
Might be a little bitter, but go for it.
Speaker 4: It's free charity.
Speaker 3: Does it taste like? Yeah, don't tell us what it
tastes like.
Speaker 2: What they missed and all that was Joe Rogan's genuine
intellectual curiosity. I was recently listening to the episode with
Michelle Faller at a point, So I was one of
if Joe had checked out, and then I realized no,
he was just taking it all in as they talked
about the space and science of a great episode.
Speaker 3: If the Earth was the dot of an eye in
a book in regular print, that the Milky Way Galaxy
would be as large as the Earth itself.
Speaker 1: Actually a little bigger.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, I mean the thing is, this is an interesting
thing about science communication. If the Sun were the size
of a dot of an eye, and you've got to remember,
you can fit a million earths inside the Sun.
Speaker 3: This is a huge thing.
Speaker 1: So if that's the size of a dot of an
eye and untext, then the galaxy would be the size
of the Earth. That's when people's eyes get big and people.
Speaker 3: Respond to so it's not just the Earth the sun.
So if the Sun was the.
Speaker 1: Dot of an eye, yeah, that's right. So make this clear.
So the Sun were the size of a dot of
an eye on a page of text, so you could
fit a million earths inside that dot of an eye,
then the Milky Way Galaxy would be bigger than the Earth.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So if the Earth was the dot of an eye,
then because the Sun is how many millions earths.
Speaker 1: The volume wise, you could fit over a million earths
inside the sun.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the sun is about eight hundred thousand miles across.
You could fit about one hundred and ten earths across
it the diameter.
Speaker 3: We do those things where you show the differences between
our sun and different stars and immense stars, and you
go bigger and bigger and bigger, and you get to
the point where you're like, I can't this is not working.
Get I can't process this. It's too coooky.
Speaker 1: There's nobody that can process it.
Speaker 2: The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode number one, guest Brian Redband,
December twenty fourth, two thousand and nine. What an interesting
time to launch a show. Christmas Eve now two thousand
and nine is early. We only got iPhones in two
thousand and seven. And if you were into podcasts in
those early days, and I was, you couldn't actually download
a podcast to your phone. You had to get it
on your laptop and then connect your phone with a
cord to the laptop and move some podcasts over. So
back in those early days, when I was listening to
things like this or a Hardwick an artist, you had
to like really do it.
Speaker 4: Start broadcast and then update, update to Twitter, and then
I always like to watch my own channel, so let's
go to your own channel so you can see what
the chat is and then update year internet tonight, update
my own or go through the faster one. You're gonna
get addicted to. Oh nice colors.
Speaker 2: Pretty So two thousand and nine is pretty early to
start a podcast, and a lot of the people that
really were the big names did start early. That's not
to take away from them, but there's obviously an advantage
to being an early adopter. You know, Maren definitely was
an early adopter, again, not taking away from anyone. So
two thousand and nine, the idea that a podcast could
be a primary media property that can compete with TV
or radio ad dollars, Yeah, we couldn't even do. It's
called dynamic insertion. Now, like you know, if you're in
I don't know, if you're listening to Portugal, serve you
local ads targeted at you in Portugal back in the day.
And I started podcasting in twenty fifteen, which was kind
of the start of round two. The ogs give us
a lot of crap for getting in late, but you know,
here eleven years later, I feel like I got in early. Anyway,
you couldn't do dynamic insertion advertising. You had to actually
bake the ads in. But Rogan wasn't thinking about a
media company. He was thinking about it as a comedian
who wanted to have long conversations with interesting people and
had figured out a way to record and distribute those
conversations for free. The early episodes of the Joe Rogan
Experience or a document of someone figuring out a format
in real time. They're loose. They have a feeling of
someone who's experimenting rather than executing. Early guests are people
who were part of the La comedy ecosystem that Rogan
was part of. The early episodes have the energy of
a thing that doesn't yet know where it's going. Where
nobody's performing for an audience, because the audience is a
little smart enough that performing for it would feel absurd. Now,
if you look back at who Rogan had on and when,
you can get a map before the culture was heading,
before the mainstream caught up. He had Elon Musk one
in twenty eighteen, before Musk had become the figure he
is now. You know, a cool scientist guy that's going
to build a mores Base. Well the electric car is
that guy? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yes. I think one of the issues with social media
that's been pointed out by many people is that, I think,
maybe particularly Instagram, people look like they have a much
better life than.
Speaker 2: They really do.
Speaker 5: Right, So, by design, yeah, people are posting pictures of
when they're really happy. They're modifying those pictures to be
better looking. Even if they're not modifying the pictures, they're
at least selecting the pictures for the best lighting, the
best angle. So people basically seem they're way better looking
than they basically really are, right, And they're way happier
seeming than they really are. So if you look at
everyone on Instagram, you might think, man, they're only happy,
beautiful people, and I'm not that looking, and I am
not happy.
Speaker 2: That conversation got watched and shared in a way that
a TV interview never would have because it was three
hours long and Rogan let must be weird and interesting
instead of trying to fit him into a seven minute window.
Rogan had on Bernie Sanders, he had on Kanye he
had scientists, fighters, comedians, authors, conspiracy theorists, doctors who disagreed
with other doctors, and he treated all of them more
or less the same way, which to say he was
genuinely curious about what they thought and asked follow up
questions and didn't try to trap anyone to score points.
That format, long curious, non adversarial, was unusual in the
media in the early twenty ten still unusual today. Cable
news had trained everyone to expect conflict and interruption. Talk
shows were in seven minute segments. Even in PR, had
you know that? NPR kind of air to it that
shaped how the questions got asked and how you answered.
Rogan didn't have any of that. He had a comedians framework,
which is what's interesting here and how do we get
to it? Those are different questions what a journal leuts asked,
and they produce different conversations. And part of the audience
that found the Joe Rogan experience did so because they
were hungry for that kind of conversation and weren't finding
it anywhere else. Personally, it's why I love the show.
Joe is genuinely curious. Sometimes I don't agree with anything
he's saying or what the guest is saying, but I
always find the conversations interesting to listen to because they're calm.
Let's talk about the comedians. When Joe Rogan had Bill
Burr on, those conversations functioned as a masterclass and how
comedians think about their work. Same with Louis c k,
same with Chappelle. They weren't promotional appearances. The guests were
there to talk about comedy in the road, what it's
like to do the thing they do, and they talked
for as long as the conversation was interesting. By twenty
fifteen or so, the podcast was the biggest in the
world by any meaningful measurement, still considered to be the
number one podcast. The advertising model was working. Rogan was
doing host red ads. Advertisers were paying for them because
the audience was enormous and loyal in a way that
podcast audiences tend to be. But the mainstream media was
still condescending, treating the Joe Rogan experience as a curiosity,
still not reckoning with the fact that what people were
listening to Rogan every week then were watching most cable
news programs. The industry was still writing think pieces about
whether or not podcasts were a real medium. Comedians understood
what Joe had built. A Rogan appearance moved tickets in
a way that a late night appearance no longer did.
Getting on Rogan was the thing, not getting on Conan
or Kimmel or Comedy Central. Rogan. Some of the comedians
who arguably Joe made their career, Sigora Kreischer, Andrew Schultz,
She and Gillis. Then the Spotify deal in twenty twenty
one hundred million dollars later reported to be closer to
two hundred million for exclusive rights to the Joe Rogan experience.
Suddenly the media was like, hey, wait, what a guy's
talking to people in a studio is worth two hundred
million dollars to Spotify. Don't forget. Spotify is a company
that has access to data about podcasts listening and made
that deal with full information about what they were buying.
Rogan was eleven years in At that point. It wasn't
a bet on what he might become. It was an
acknowledgment of what he was reading. He was the largest
and most influential audio media property in the world. Built
without a network, without a studio, without a development deal,
no big company behind it, just a comedian who wanted
to have conversations with interesting people and figured out how
to distribute them. That deal did create some friction. People
would listen to the podcast on their regular app, now
how to listen to it on Spotify. That's when I
started listening a little less because I don't love the
Spotify app. Also, the show was moved off YouTube at
that point, so there's some audio disruption. I know, personally,
if I heard enough buzz on an episode, I'd go
listen to it on Spotify. But you know, for the
most part, I skipped a lot of those years. Then
covid comes along and some controversies. Neil Young pulled his
music from Spotify to protest Joe Rogan's COVID episodes. That
became a whole cultural moment. In early twenty twenty two,
there were calls for Spotify to drop Rogan entirely. Spotify
stock dropped Spotify put Good Content Advisor on some episodes.
They issued a statement they kept the deal intact. The
cultural pressure that was supposed to make Rogan radioactive basically
no effect on the one thing Spotify cared about, which
was whether or not people kept pressing play. Eventually, the
Spotify deal was redone so that you can now listen
to the show on any app or on YouTube. Just
like we did in olden times. And then there's the
political aspect to this. Joe always had on political guests,
for example, Bernie Sanders. In twenty twenty, politicians realized they
could reach young men who don't watch cable news, who
don't read political newspapers. By twenty twenty four, the show
had become something that presidential campaigns felt they needed to
engage with. At least one of them did. Donald Trump
came on in October twenty twenty four, sat with Rogan
for three hours. No prepared questions, no handler, no seven
minute segments, just Rogan and Trump talking the way Rogan
talks to everyone, with genuine curiosity and without the adversarial
framework that defines most political interviews.
Speaker 6: It was really like two different lives. You know. I
had a very wonderful life, but I wanted to do this.
The Apprentice was still going very strong. We had twelve seasons,
and we had actually fourteen seasons twelve years over.
Speaker 3: They had a couple, well, they canceled The Apprentice when
you were running for president.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 6: No, they had Arnold Schwarzenegga do it. I was involved
in that, and I had enough of it, and we
did great. It was doing great, but they wanted me
to stay. They all came to see me. They said,
we're going to give you a contract. They wanted to
extend my contract. Mark Burnett is a great guy. Then
they wanted to extend the contract. Mark said, you're crazy.
Don't run. Don't run. Nobody gives up prime time. They said,
you know, it's one of those little things, which is
probably true.
Speaker 3: Nobody gets for the most time for being president.
Speaker 6: For running well, for running against twenty some ORed people,
you know. It turned out to be eighteen eighteen professional people,
you know, mostly politicians.
Speaker 2: The episode got something like forty million views in the
first few days. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris's campaign made the decision
not to go on Rogan. In October of twenty twenty five,
Harris told the Diary of a CEO podcast, I wanted
to do Joe Rogan Show, and there were a lot
of games being played, but I wanted to do Rogan Show.
There was some claim in a book that the Harris
campaign had rearranged her schedule for a possible appearance on
the show, but were told that Joe was taking a
personal day, which turned out to be the same day
Rogan interview. Trump. Rogan fired back, saying Harris and her
team never agreed to an appearance on the podcast. Joe
also said that the Harris team wanted him to travel
from Austin to New York to do the interview. On
The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe said he wanted to do
Trump and Harris on the same day. That was my goal.
I even offered to do it late that same night,
the night Trump came on. I'm like, what if we
do her while she's in Houston, if she came here,
But no one ever committed to doing it. This is
really important because they keep pretending like I lied. Harris
said on a subsequent podcast appearance that she wanted to
go on Rogan show but was advised not to because
they assumed. As it turned out to be correct. It
says the quote that he was supporting Trump and that
it would not be a productive piece for me. But
just like when I went on Fox News with Brent Beher,
my perspective was they might have their bias, but there
are people who listen who are open minded, and I'm
going to go there and give them a chance to
get to know me and make my case to them.
So that was my perspective on Joe Rogan, just like
it was from my perspective on Fox. She concluded of
the topic, I definitely regret that we didn't do it.
You start a podcast in two thousand and nine because
you want to talk to your comedian friends for three hours.
Fifteen years later, presidential campaigns are making strategic decisions about
whether or not to appear on your show. Joe Rogan
experience still number one. You can comment on this episode
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