Okay, fine. I'll do it.
The Left wants their own Joe Rogan.
This past weekend was a big one for fights between people who shouldn’t be fighting. On Friday night, 58-year-old ex-heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson, had an ill-advised boxing match against 27-year-old ex-Disney-Channel-star and human red flag, Jake Paul. On Saturday night, 37-year-old Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight champ, Jon Jones, squared off against Stipe Miocic, a 42-year-old who hadn’t fought in 5 years. Spoiler alert: both of the younger people won. But everyone got paid handsomely, so everybody “won.” The biggest losers were the people like me who tuned into Netflix to watch Tyson vs. Paul. We all knew it was going to be a bad fight. (It was worse than that.) And Netflix is included in the “we” who “knew it was going to be a bad fight.” Clearly, Netflix has decided that they want our attention more than they want our respect.
One of the other big winners of the weekend was Joe Rogan. Joe spent Saturday night at the place where he probably does his best work, cage-side at a UFC fight doing color commentary. Joe Rogan has been a UFC employee since the UFC was considered human cockfighting by most people, including Senator John McCain. Now Joe is an essential part of a sport that used to be ignored by ESPN and is now a business partner of ESPN.
Rogan’s cage-side seat put him in the center of what turned out to be big political celebration. See, president-elect Donald Trump and his valet Elon Musk were also sitting cage-side on Saturday. The night before the election, Joe Rogan endorsed Donald Trump. At Trump’s victory speech, Trump’s good friend — UFC President and C.E.O. Dana White —came onstage and thanked Joe Rogan for his help in electing Trump. So Saturday night wasn’t just a big fight night for the UFC, it was a victory party for Donald Trump and MAGA. Even during Saturday night’s event, more than one fighter paid tribute to Donald Trump after winning their fight. As I have written before, the UFC and MAGA are inseparably intertwined at this point. I used to be a regular buyer of the UFC’s content, and this full embrace of Trumpism is why I no longer partake.
The MAGA spectacle of Saturday night came at the end of a long week of people on the Left hypothesizing that one way to reclaim some of the votes that didn’t go Kamala’s way on election day is for the Left to find our own Joe Rogan. Or worse, some people on the Left think that more left-leaning people should go on Joe Rogan’s podcast. (Quick. Do you know the name of Joe Rogan’s podcast? Without looking it up? If so, put it in the comments. I want to see something.)
Neither of these ideas is it. As painful as it is to hear, Kamala was not one Joe Rogan appearance away from being the president. Also Joe Rogan is not the lefty voice you’ve been looking for.
When you say you want a leftist version of Joe Rogan, you’re saying that you don’t listen to Joe Rogan without saying you don’t listen to Joe Rogan. What you are saying is that you only know Joe Rogan from mainstream articles about Joe Rogan… most of which you have never completely read. You’ve seen Joe Rogan looking casual, yet concerned in the pages of the New York Times. You’ve seen him go toe to toe with CNN’s resident doctor Sanjay Gupta. You’ve never listened to his podcast, but he doesn’t seem that bad. He’s skeptical. Just like you!
Well today, you all are lucky, because I, W. Kamau Bell, am one of the few lefties with many years of first-hand Rogan experience. I’ve been on the podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. Twice, in fact!
And I am a comedian who was on the stand-up scene during the rise of this version of Joe Rogan. I saw the evolution (or devolution depending on your perspective) from Joe Rogan, star of the sitcom News Radio, to Joe Rogan, public intellectual for people who hate actual intellectuals. And that’s not an insult to Joe's intelligence. He often says of himself, “Don’t listen to me. I’m a fucking idiot.”
Once you take away Joe’s right wing bonafides, you aren’t left with much left. His leftist beliefs basically boil down to liking to smoke weed and being fine with the LGBTQ community up to a point. (The “T” part being the point where his lefty-ness starts to crumble.) And let’s be honest, rich white guys who like to workout all the time and enjoy living in Texas are rarely the fount of the new Left. Most of Joe’s politics boils down to high-school-era libertarianism. And when you dig deeper into Joe Rogan’s extensive podcast catalog, you find a hornet’s nest of wrong inside a Pandora’s box of awful. I say that as someone who used to be a semi-regular listener of his podcast. In fact, I still tune in when he is talking about mixed martial arts. Mixed martial arts is maybe the only subject about which Joe Rogan is capable of opining without setting off all the misinformation alarms.
Rogan sets himself up as a conversational seeker of information, but that’s not true. Joe wants to hear himself talk (which is understandable since he’s a comedian), and he wants to be entertained… but not overwhelmed. He wants his guests to tell him things that spark off the firework emotions – happiness, amazement, and excitement. But he also loves when the firework blows off somebody else’s body part. In the process, Joe feels very little responsibility to get things right or even seek out truly alternative viewpoints. They could easily rename the show Joe Rogan’s Confirmation Bias! Nothing bums Rogan out more than one of his guests or his producer Jamie correcting something that Joe fully believes. In these moments, Joe deflates and quickly changes the subject. He comes off like a ten-year-old caught in a lie. “Little Joey, the dog didn’t eat your homework. You are eating your homework, right now. I’m watching you eat it, Little Joey.” Joe is the personification of the Mark Twain quote “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” But the difference is, Mark Twain filed his work in the fiction section. Joe wants to play footsies with serious subjects and when he is roundly criticized or even more roundly corrected, he slinks back to, “Don’t listen to me. I’m a fucking idiot.”
Because of the way Joe runs his podcast, it isn’t really even a “show.” It is a clubhouse, and you pay your membership dues by being able to sit through conversations that are regularly three hours long. Three hours of Elon Musk sounds like a reality show challenge straight from Joe Rogan’s old show, Fear Factor. People want to cast Joe Rogan as some sort of Human Growth Hormone Terri Gross, but he's just the guy in the frat house who won’t shut up. It’s fine if you enjoy that guy. But never take him seriously.
While some people are imploring the Left to get their own Joe Rogan, others are insisting that we should just be regular guests on Joe’s podcast. It’s so popular! Why not?! That’s fool’s gold. Like really low quality fool’s gold. Like someone handing you a gold-wrapped chocolate coin, but they ate the chocolate. Again, I’ve been on twice and I ain’t going back. Seeing the popularity of the Joe Rogan podcast and thinking that the Left should send more people on the show is like seeing that your local Ku Klux Klan meeting is packed every week and then thinking that you should spend more time at Ku Klux Klan meetings. Joe Rogan was the place where Alex Jones got his mainstream sea legs. Joe has had Alex Jones on for years, well before Alex Jones became known for pushing Sandy Hook conspiracy theories that he knew were lies. Rogan had him back on the podcast well after Alex was found liable for said lies. Why would Joe do that? Because he finds Alex entertaining.
Joe Rogan isn’t some sort of naive, curious conversationalist. Joe Rogan spreads transphobia, anti-vaccine propaganda, and conspiracy theories all over his audience, like a fluffy human dandelion. Joe Rogan is not a good faith actor. Joe Rogan proudly celebrates his pot smoking while living in a state that is still locking people up for marijuana. But Joe can celebrate his pot smoking because Joe is smart about one thing: being friends with Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas. That’s the same Greg Abbott who called anti-abortion activists “life savers.” This is the same Greg Abbott, who upon Trump’s election, made it clear that even though his constituents are nearly 40% Latino, he is totally on board with mass deportations. And let’s remember that the Latino community often live in mixed status families, so mass deportations mean literally ripping families apart. Let’s see Joe get his friend Greg on the podcast and ask a question about that.
Joe had the nerve (or maybe he had the cowardice) to have Donald Trump on his podcast, and he didn’t ask him one tough question. Joe is obsessed with all things Jeffrey Epstein, but somehow he forgot all about those questions he had when Trump (a person that Epstein considered a friend) was sitting right in his podcast studio. Joe spent years speculating with whoever would listen about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s alleged steroid use. Last year when he finally had The Rock on his podcast, he suddenly didn’t have any thoughts on the subject.
The times that Joe does bring on people like myself who are “on the Left,” the perspective they bring doesn’t always stick to Joe as easily as the perspectives of people from the right. Joe has had astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on several times. Neil has walked Joe through why we definitely landed on the moon. But Joe still plays footsies with moon landing conspiracy theorists. And even though Joe claims he believes that the world is round, Joe asked Neil deGrasse Tyson to debate a flat earther. This would be like me demanding LeBron James play me in a one on one basketball game just to prove he is better than me. The only one who wins in that scenario is me, because I got LeBron to come to my level. Neil quickly swatted away the request from Joe like even the question was a waste of Neil’s time.
But things don’t work out as well for everyone who doesn’t want to engage with Joe on his terms. Dr. Peter Hotez is the Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine down the road from Joe in Houston, Texas. Dr. Hotez has spent his career developing vaccines that have been administered to literally hundreds of millions of people. He spent more than ten years working on a category of diseases that he and his colleagues named “neglected tropical diseases.” He did this in order to get medical science to focus more of its resources on these deadly diseases. Dr. Hotez’s daughter is autistic, and he wrote a book entitled Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism: My Journey As a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad. He is a truly beautiful man of science on a mission to help humanity. I know about Dr. Hotez’s work because he was a guest on my old podcast Politically Reactive. He just wants to be of service to humanity.
How does this relate to Rogan? Well Dr. Hotez was a guest on Rogan’s podcast, twice. Once in March 2019 and then once in April 2020, during the early days of COVID. Dr. Hotez’s work on COVID vaccines and his advocacy for vaccination is where he ran afoul of Joe Rogan. Understandably, as COVID continued and more people died, the doctor became frustrated with all of the vaccine misinformation that Joe was spreading and promoting. When Dr. Hotez finally tweeted that he felt Joe’s lies and propaganda were not helpful, Joe publicly challenged Dr. Hotez to debate… wait for it… Robert Kennedy, Jr.! Once again, we are in a “LeBron vs. Kamau” situation. Joe even said he would give $100,000 to charity. When Dr. Hotez refused the challenge, Joe’s online minions dogpiled on top of him, and some people even showed up to the doctor’s front door to confront him. Dr. Hotez believes that was because of the public “beef.” Joe never called off his dogs. Joe never apologized to a man who is truly only trying to help humanity and who had previously been a guest on his podcast. Is this the guy the Left needs to recreate or spend more time with? If so, count me out of the Left.
You know the comedian who famously called Puerto Rico a garbage island? Welp, that comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, is a Joe Rogan disciple. Joe might as well be Tony’s daddy. When Joe moved to Austin in the wake of COVID, a bunch of LA comedians followed him, including Tony Hinchcliffe.
If all this is your cup of tea, then good for you. We all love spree feech! But don’t tell me that the Left needs anything like it.
The media and Rogan’s fans have led many of you to believe that Joe Rogan is some sort of common man who has built a community table for connection through his podcast. But it isn’t that. It is more like if your next door neighbor’s man cave had live broadcasts, and somehow The New York Times decided the content was effete and urbane. What you should be saying is that the Left needs to uplift more of its already powerful voices. Voices that can be our cultural engine the same way that Rogan has become the right’s. But it’s on you to do that.
One thing I will certainly give Joe credit for is that he built his audience. He started in the early days of podcasting, way before there was money to be made. But Joe also did that in a country that prioritizes white, male voices and punishes and throttles all other voices. So when I hear the want for a “leftist Joe Rogan,” what I am hearing is that the Left wants to prioritize whiteness and specifically white maleness even more than this country already does. That is explicitly not a “leftist position.”
The other frustrating thing is that I know this stems from some on the Left wanting to court Rogan’s audience. Again, that’s more white males. That is clearly Joe’s core audience. That’s not the Left’s core audience, despite many Democrats’ attempts to make it true. The Left needs to court the millions and millions of voters who define themselves as being on the Left but didn’t define Kamala that way. Those millions and millions of people either chose someone other than Kamala OR didn’t vote for president at all. That is where all the Left’s sweat should be going. That is a multi-racial, multi-religion, youth-led, working-class coalition of voters. The Democrats should absolutely not be looking to court “the guy who drives a truck back home at the end of the day,” as a Rhode Island DNC Committee member said when he was talking about the future of the Democratic Party.
It is also worth pointing out that the Left’s new interest in Joe Rogan may be arriving too late. While the Left is turning toward Joe Rogan, many in Joe Rogan’s audience are growing tired of Joe and his act. Literally. His recent Netflix comedy special, Burn The Boats, got incredibly bad reviews… from Joe’s own audience. They are growing tired of Joe’s ego and they are starting to see the seams of his personality pull apart like a hot cinnamon roll. Joe needs to feel like a king. He’d rather be wrong than righteous. And he is an easy mark for white men who are richer, have a military background, or who have a college degree… but no integrity.
But fine, if you want a “leftist Joe Rogan”, I’ll do it.
But by “do it,” I don’t mean I’ll be the next Joe Rogan. That sounds like a nightmare labyrinth of inanity.
What I mean by “do it” is I’ll help you find the “Left’s Joe Rogan.” I’ll be the host of the reality show, America’s Next Leftist Joe Rogan. I’ll gather a bunch white guys who get all their information from Reddit and all their workout supplements from the gym parking lot. We’ll make sure they are rich enough that their empathy button is broken, but are surrounded by enough sycophants that they can convince themselves that they are “just one of the guys.” And most importantly, we will make sure that we continue to let the right dictate the movements of the Democratic party instead staying true to leftist principles and making sure the Democratic party lives up to those principles. Sound good to you? Because it sounds like shit to me.
But don’t listen to me. I’m a fucking dreamer.
You’re With Me
Help Tell the Story of the Uncommitted Movement
In 2017, on Season 2, episode 4 of United Shades of America, we did an episode focusing on Muslims in a small towns. It was shortly after Trump’s first election. People in this town were (rightfully) afraid of what was to come. In that episode I met Razi Jafri. It was a simple street interview, but he made an impression on me.
Cut to earlier this year, when I was speaking at an ITVS event in San Francisco, and Razi reintroduced himself. I remembered him right away. He is now a documentary filmmaker and producer making a film about the Uncommitted Movement. He’s been embedded with the Uncommitted Movement since the early days, filming everything. If you aren’t aware, this a movement that emerged in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza in response to Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7th. I have come onboard to help as an executive producer of the film. Razi is independently raising fund to finish the documentary because it is important to him to have the freedom to make the exact film he wants to make. Donate and/or spread the word if you can.
“With the relentless ongoing genocide in Gaza, brave American activists and leaders under the banner of the unprecedented Uncommitted movement use the tools of democracy fight for their community and try to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza. With your support, we can bring their story to the screen!”
I’M GOING ON TOUR!
W. Kamau Bell’s WHO’S WITH ME?
The 2025 Stand-Up Comedy Tour
You asked for it. Or maybe you didn’t, but I’m about to go back on the road to do stand-up. After a 2024 run at The Berkeley Rep and an incredible show in Davis, CA, I’m heading out on he road to do stand-up comedy in 2025. These hectic times demand some jokes, written hectically while I’m also trying to raise three kids.
The WHO’S WITH ME? tour presale tickets go on sale THIS WEDNESDAY, November 20 at 10am your local time. Use the promo code WKB. Get the tickets here.
Note: DC tickets go on sale Thursday 10am EST.
Hope to see you out there. More dates to come!
amen! also, and I know this is petty but I did cackle out loud to myself seeing how wee Joe Rogan looks in that pic with you
Did anyone else see the title and hope that Politically Reactive was coming back?!