The Joe Rogan Hive
Our most famous bard suffers from a condition of what Freud calls "Penis envy"
We’ve always been patrons of performers, of hiring a personal jester or singer to entertain us through the follies of a clambering destiny. We’ve always hired poets to be cleverly eulogistic of our feeling, to praise and amuse us to death. We have always been a people of bards and minstrels and troubadours, demanding their youth of delights to be a part of us too. Aneirin was one of our earliest bards, a 6th century Celtic war poet, in a Cumbric kingdom of Yr Hen Ogledd, an “Old North” Britton region north of modern-day Britain. He wrote “Y Gododdin,” an epic war poem about a group of three hundred men bravely going to battle, severely outnumbered, persevering for several days until they were finally defeated. Taliesin was another bard of similar fashion, whose poems were laudatory songs performed for kings. Bards are typically considered of ancient Welsh and Irish tradition; troubadours are ancient French composers and performers of their poetry; minstrels are a bit similar, but they served more as fools and jesters, general entertainers for the aristocratic classes. But by the late 15th century, these minstrels were replaced with the more refined and sophisticated troubadours, and sent out to perform on the streets for the people, street musicians and entertainers slowly evolving into the performers we idolize today. Taylor Swift is a simple minstrel, dancing and unfurling larger ubiquitous truths through song, articulating the private despairs of trying to find love, uniting us all through poems about ex-boyfriends, finding a thread to weave for us all to agree in our common experience.
But what if you’re a man? And what if you’re a macho man and you don’t want to be sung to? You want to feel like you’re part of a conversation of ideas. You don’t really care for the peasantry of pop music, but rather a type of pop contrarianism.
There’s a photo from 2018 that featured an important cast of thinkers all having dinner together. It was Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Bret and Eric Weinstein, and Dave Rubin. They, along with a handful of others, are widely regarded as the Intellectual Dark Web, an instigative name for the club of pop contrarians, guys who want you to know how much they hate identity politics, cancel culture, and political correctness. Rogan is a cage fighter commentator and comedian. Jordan Peterson is mostly known for refusing to call trans kids by their pronouns. He only eats meat, is severely depressed, addicted to anti-depressants, and he spends most of his time crying in interviews and speeches. Sam Harris is an atheist, whose real talent is making himself sound smart in everything he says, but very rarely says anything even remotely intelligent. Ben Shapiro is a Zionist who has spent much of his career violently hating all things rap, Barbie, Cardi B’s Wap, but specializes in speaking at university campuses, and during the q&a sessions he absolutely DESTROYS trembling blue-haired liberals with FACTS and LOGIC. Bret Weinstein got famous in a race debacle at the university he use to teach at, and, well, that’s kind of it; he doesn’t really have any interesting ideas. He doesn’t think affirmative action should continue, I guess that’s a relatively novel notion for a reasonable sounding man? He was a victim of the social justice warriors, and has become a sort of mild-mannered survivor, explaining over and over how he was a target of their wrath. His brother, Eric, the mathematician, works for the billionaire venture capitalist and national conservative Peter Thiel. And Dave Rubin is a Twitter addicted libertarian more or less just parroting his way to popularity. Together, their thoughts define much of the framework of today’s popular intellectual and contrarian landscape. But it’s Joe Rogan who has dominated the lot, serving as a helmsman for the big kid club.
Typical criticism of Rogan is the kind of stuff you’d expect. Mostly vanity insults, tedious indignities about his height (he’s 5’8”), the fact that he’s bald, tried hair plugs for a while, like stapling carpet samples to his skull. He has helped popularize the use of Testosterone Replacement Therapy; he’s a hunting advocate, especially with bow and arrow, is the UFC color commentator, was the host of Fear Factor back in the day where he got people to eat testicles and cockroaches like some histrionic game of Dare. At one time or another he has believed in nearly every popular conspiracy theory—he also had a television show devoted to this. You could dive into any one of these facts about him and tease out a great deal of fun. You could write long playful musings about how this short bald man is clearly in a lifelong psychotic break of masculine identity, some chiseled Herculean desire of the self, a sheer measure of compensation, the whole big-truck-small-dick shibboleth, an obvious response to not being loved enough by his father, which he has openly spoken a great deal about. The thing is, Joe Rogan seems like a genuinely nice person, or at least, he’s very eager to be a nice person, eager for the world to like him, eager for the futility of the love of strangers. In a sense, he comes across as a very nice version of Andrew Tate, addicted to this hallmark form of virility, a very loud and attention-seeking whore, a macho man, a Liver King with a bit more finesse. But then on the other hand, he’s more like a modern elaboration of Larry King, talking into a microphone usually with one guest, hunched over the table on his elbows, talking for thousands and thousand of hours, tedious diatribes of hilarity and madness, unfurling perversions of fulminating gore, where the lulls of life’s thoughts that arise during the quiet plateaus of our solitude are squashed out with his banter. On social media, he films himself in his underwear dunking into his cold plunge, offering free fodder for memes of a gargantuan shaved ape aflame with his health ritual.
Podcasts are sonorous storms of white noise, jittering radio assault, like the amateur porn version of disc jockeys where everyone can clamp a microphone onto the edge of their table, and lean into that bulging phallus, that cushiony rod that projects with attention for your lips to come near, that captures your distinct honks and caws of human speech, your opining, this great maudlin scream of opinions. It captures is all and sends it down a little wire, and flares it out across the world in a mosaic of encrusted beacons, and beams its sirens into the skulls of whoever’s out there listening. They can just talk and talk, and the noise will venture out into the cold eternity, flying out amongst the stars for the aliens to hear the last echoes of our memory.
In 1977, NASA sent out the two Voyager Golden Records, phonograph records attached to the Voyager craft, imprinted with music from Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Chuck Berry, and many others, with the fun thought that some distant advanced alien civilization might come across it some day in the vast forever of the empty black ocean of space, and they might play this record and be impressed by the musicality of this planet called Earth. Carl Sagan was behind this effort. He referred to this project as a kind of bottle sent out into the cosmic ocean. Of course, the scale of the Voyager drifting into the unknown forever is immeasurably larger than a bottle out at sea, a certain impossibility that it would ever be stumbled upon. But Sagan was most effective at garnering popular enthusiasm about science and the stars. He made people care. But I’m not sure if Bach and Beethoven is a fair representation of us. It’s not really accurate of who were are as a people. A better representation, if sent out into the cosmic arena today, would be a hard drive with ten million terabytes of podcast noise. Joe Rogan is the gravitational center of podcasters which we all orbit around, whether you listen to him or not. He was one of the earliest podcasters, recording his conversations with his comedian friends at his dining room table, and over time this has since compelled countless Brendan Schaub types—these smarmy parrots lampooning through the periphery of his fame. They are the off-putting prodigy of this übermensch husky-man, the disciples of their steroid god who taught them how to have a conversation.
It’s Rogan’s masculinity complex that is most interesting. I am not mocking. Inspiring a generation to train in jiu jitsu or some other martial art, to commit steadfastly to fitness and health, and channeling the excess male energy into a dedicated personal excellence—these are positive efforts that he has wittingly fed into the gears of society. But there’s something else clearly at play, and psychoanalytically, I fear it is quite grim. Typically, seeing any man going out of his way to be as manly as possible, one becomes suspicious. Given that Rogan is a short bald man, who hunts and fights and has full sleeve tattoos, the sirens are blaring, pointing to the culprit of what Freud referred to as “penis envy.” Now, Freud reserved this concept for an explanation in the female condition. His outline of the psychosexual development of women, and as an extension of Oedipus, he explained that women offered nothing of their own to the production line of human ingenuity, that they were essentially just men without penises, and therefore suffered from this penis envy. This is apparent at an early stage of a girl’s development, when they realize they are essentially castrated men, and are therefore debilitated with further anxiety that they have to venture this world with the ineptitude that castration commits you to. Freud went on to say that female clitoral masturbation suffers from general worthlessness than that of male masturbation, that it is only mimicking a male act. (This is perhaps a discomfiting admission on Freud’s part, almost identical to when Ben Shapiro criticized Cardi B’s WAP because, as he angrily compelled his audience, it was impossible for women to get as wet as the song says.) But according to Freud, the only way to triumph over this handicap of castration, of being born without a penis, was to become pregnant, ideally giving birth to a boy, living as a man vicariously through this child. Now, this is all meant as an explainer for the obvious evolution of thought. First, is Derrida’s phallogocentrism, a blend of the terms phallocentrism—or the male-dominated view—and logocentrism—the concept that language provides meaning to everything in the world. In other words, the world is constructed in man’s own image of how we interact with it, a sort of cyclone of a self-reverential image of itself. (Think Tom Cruise’s character in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia: “Respect the Cock! Tame the Cunt!” as a sort of outrageous manifestation of this masculinity that is then projected out into the world full hilt.)
But then of course, there is the feminist response to this, the idea of “womb envy,” developed by the Neo-Freudian German psychoanalyst, Karen Horney (Horney herself, is of course a victim of nominative determinism, the theory within psychology that you are drawn to professions that are alluded to within your name, the most famous example being men named Dennis are more likely to become dentists. So, if your name is Karen Horney, you don’t really have any other choice than to become a Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst). Womb envy is pretty much what you think it is. Men are in fact the ones debilitated by the realization of their futility. They shoot their load, and then may as well die off, for it is the women who grow other humans inside their wombs, it is women who produce sweetened milk like magical springs arising from commonplace utters, it is women who are responsible for all human life, and therefore all human ingenuity. Evolutionarily, we may as well have developed the same practice as the preying mantis, and our lovers just eaten off our heads after the fornicating seed is in place. But, we didn’t, and as Horney points out, we developed our expertise in business and war, in the most effective way of accruing wealth for ourselves and keeping it away from others, in the most efficient and expedient ways of killing each other off. This is all to say that it’s clear that Joe Rogan suffers from an unconscious psychological conspiracy plotted against him. Look at the signs the way a conspiracy theorist would, the way Joe Rogan would. Rogaine is the common hair product used to help stimulate hair growth in bald men. Joe Rogan was doomed before he had any say in the matter, cursed by the same nominative determinism that cursed the rest of us to our lackluster destinies. To use his Intellectual Dark Web podcast disciple, Sam Harris, who does not believe in any measure of free will, Joe Rogan almost certainly became an MMA fighter because of his height, or some combination of his height and his complex with his own father. This is all mildly interesting enough to consider. But the real shocking realization is with the concept of “penis envy” itself. Penis envy is also the name of a popular psychedelic mushroom, of which Rogan is a popular and outspoken psychonaut, popularizing the regular use of magic mushrooms, DMT, and especially cannabis. By this determination, Rogan was destined to not only be who he is because he was born short and bald, but that truth then led him to his true destiny of loving psychedelic experiences and spreading his love for them to his audience.
Derrida identified phonocentrism—the idea that spoken language is tantamount to the written word—as a major force moving through society that we have to reckon with one way or another. Because in speaking, we can immediately and directly communicate ideas and understanding, and we don’t have to wade through the sludge of books and papers. Because writing is not really an accurate representation of our thoughts, as it is more of a kind of fabrication that mimics the language of thought, disguising its manipulations as the ramblings within your own head. Phonocentrism is a key component of logocentrism, and therefore of phallogocentrism. Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, is the clear and inevitable manifestation of all of these psychoanalytic concepts. It is about speaking rather than reading, about language rather than anything intrinsic to the world, and it’s about the male perspective rather than any other.
Rogan is very talented at what he does. It turns out that talking is a difficult thing to pull off well. You only realize this when you occasionally stumble upon some unknown niche podcast that you’ve never heard of before and you’ll never listen to again, and you quickly become annoyed by the pace of their banter, their painful tryhard quips, their eating, their pointless tangents and rehearsals of those insipid doldrums. It is all too painful to listen to. The vast majority of our conversation is this way, we are just usually too involved in ourselves to ever notice how bad it actually is. A good audiobook, for example, is an incredible achievement to pull of well. I was listening to one the other day, and it allows you to get fully immersed in the story, and not distracted by the voice and identity of the reader. I listened to the passage again, and then paused it, and read aloud from the same book I had at home, and just listened to my performance as an observer. It was mostly an awkward muddle. Now, I still have a minor stutter I never fully ironed out as a kid. It’s not obvious, but it’s obvious to me, and there are certain vocal tricks I can do to disguise it most of the time when in conversation, but when I read aloud, I can’t exactly add bridge words and ums and uhhs to hide my flaws. This is probably why I prefer to write. Nevertheless, if you really listen to people’s speech, it is usually astounding how clumsy it actually is, more of a profane gyration of grunts and honks, an unidiomatic betrayal of this marvelous gift of speech that’s been given to us. Joe Rogan is clearly a very natural and comfortable conversationalist, but he’s also trained himself. He’s said before that early on he would go back and listen to his conversations and criticize himself and make notes on how to improve. And so he is able to have conversations with comedians and mathematicians and professors, with libertarians and socialists and anthropologists and professional fighters. Joe Rogan’s speech is like that of a modern bard. He’s been described elsewhere as a Gwyneth Paltrow for men, but he’s more of a Taylor Swift for men, because while he might not sing, this is only a mere stylistic choice. We used to always sing.
The Iliad for example was meant to be sung. It wasn’t originally intended to be read. And surely it wasn’t meant to just sit there unopened on your bookshelf like a prop. It was meant to be accompanied by a four-stringed lyre. It was meant to be memorized. Socrates famously never wrote anything down that is now attributed to him—he believed that in writing it down we would lose our ability for deep meaningful comprehension. And so singers were able to memorize these behemoths of poetry and perform them for the public. This is akin to the bard tradition.
In William Blake’s Songs of Experience, he writes about the ancient bard:
“Youth of delight come hither.
And see the opening morn,
Image of truth new born.
Doubt is fled & clouds of reason
Dark disputes & artful teazing.
Folly is an endless maze,
Tangled roots perplex her ways.
How many have fallen there!
They stumble all night over bones of the dead
And feel they know not what but care;
And wish to lead others when they should be led.”
Blake is speaking as the bard. In the accompanying painting, the bard is an old bearded man with women and children huddled around him, listening. He’s reassuring them that the spring of regeneration is upon them, even as the doubts and disputes can seem overwhelming at times, even as “the bones of the dead” lay in front of them. It’s a simple adage of hope and resilience, of the optimism of the “youth of delight.” And it remains evident in most of us as we grow older. We typically get more cynical and prideful as we age, we get more conservative in our politics. Our energy and optimism for creating change in a more utilitarian capacity dwindles.
Joe Rogan, as a bard, and as a man, has lost the youth of delight, lost the luster of the fun and novelty of smoking pot with friends and looking up cool alligator videos. They laugh, and then take another hit, and then Joe asks his guest if he’s ever smoked DMT. I used to listen during those days. It was fun because it was also in the nascent days of podcasting, and you didn’t really hear too many of these types of conversations being had.
Today, there’s a massive Spotify contract to be beholden to, there’s fame and the expectation of holding up a reputation, there’s the burden of satisfying your loyal fans. In a recent episode with comedian Bobby Lee, Rogan went off on a rant he must have repeated dozens, maybe hundreds of times at this point, about the “totalitarian,” “gestapo shit” of the Covid lockdowns. Bobby Lee didn’t seem to know what to say, as he kept trying to bring the conversation back to a fun and lighthearted thing between the two of them. More lately, Rogan seems to be almost derailing into the edges of mental illness, spinning into impassioned harangues about trans athletes and the Covid lockdowns again and again and again. And it’s not that these aren’t topics worthy of interesting conversations, it’s that it’s the only thing he ever wants to talk about anymore. Covid broke his brain, and now he’s stuck in a permanent frenzy, slamming his fists in paranoid fits of rage. He’s become the stereotypical uncle at thanksgiving dinner who won’t stop talking about gay school teachers converting your children. He’s stated before that he does absolutely no preparation for any of his thousands of guests, so when someone like Glenn Greenwald comes on, and Rogan derails into a lengthy monologue about the trans athlete thing, you realize that interview was a totally wasted opportunity to discuss what Greenwald specializes in.
Rogan is the modern manifestation of Rush Limbaugh. Not for their respective politics necessarily. Actually, for the amount that Rogan talks, he has remained purposefully elusive with where he lies politically. And this is important for him to do, as it’s the best way to retain as large of an audience as possible, so everyone listening can feel like he’s speaking for them. Similarly, a Taylor Swift song is popular for the same reasons, for all of her mostly young female fans, Swift is describing their breakup to them. Rogan has said at one point that he’s “practically a socialist,” but then at other times said he would vote for Trump, and he seems to be in confident agreement with many of the extremely conservative guests he brings on his podcast. Nevertheless, his similarity to Limbaugh is more due to this tawdry and bedizened form of manliness. It’s more of a kind of beastliness, like a shaved and feral pink-fleshed varmint, this wild thing that’s been caught and observed for money and entertainment in his cage, like the Idiot in Blood Meridian who is brought out to eat turds for a nickel.
But these two men are preachers. And like all preachers, they are the paranoid kind, angry and enthused, screaming from the street corner about the coming rapture. They have both taken the form of some ravenous American effigy of this all-consumptive virility. There’s something carnal about their shapes, something almost sexual and profane, like a flesh-crammed grotesquerie of man, so much meat bulging within the confines of their skin.
Limbaugh was a much more aggressive form of conservative; he was relatively obese, more bovine than man, an angry, cigar smoking, opiate pill addicted, personification of the unapologetic American excesses. He spoke on the radio for three hours a day, five days a week, an ungodly amount of talking. He was a regular conservative early on in his career, but in order to fill that many hours, you have to weave these arabesque tapestries of the hysterical and insane. Just to fill the time. The same thing has happened to Joe Rogan. In the nascent beginnings of his podcast, he would just smoke pot with his comedian friends and talk about things like how a female spotted hyena’s massive clitoris enveloped around a male’s penis during copulation. And now he is this monolithic brand of the all-American man, providing a safe space for the politically-destitute-but-well-informed-idiot. He is a bard suffering from a grave masculine psychosis.
But he is our bard. He is slowly going mad in front of us. And it seems fitting in a way, for the same is happening to us all, individually and collectively. The Joe Rogan Experience has become an epic decade-long performance art piece about one man’s slow burn into madness. Here we are, mad and enraged. This is just the beginning.
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