A Split in the Roganverse

Recently, I felt a great disturbance in the world of podcasts, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced. Someone had been on Joe Rogan’s show and pointed out that getting your opinions entirely from stand-up comics, Bigfoot forums, and various men named Dave might not be the optimal method for acquiring knowledge. Rogan fans were appalled at this disrespect.

The culprit was the British writer Douglas Murray, who confronted Rogan earlier this month over the podcaster’s decision to platform a series of guests with, shall we say, minority views on the Second World War. The obvious example is Darryl Cooper, a “storyteller” who has lately taken a sharp turn into Nazi apologism. “I’m just interested in your selection of guests, because you’re, like, the world’s number-one podcast,” Murray told Rogan. This kind of direct challenge is quite simply not how things are done in the anti-woke sphere, which is brutally hierarchical. Free-speech absolutism does not include lèse-majesté. “Principleless hacks,” the libertarian podcaster Clint Russell posted on X afterwards, referring to Murray and those who support him. “And that’s assuming this is genuine and not a paid op, which would be even worse—disreputable mercenaries.”

[Read: The dangerous rise of podcast historians]

Murray’s pointed criticism of Rogan’s approach, made right to his face, has prompted other aftershocks across the Roganverse, that loose collection of comics and podcasters who dominate the podcast market. Afterwards, Murray discussed the interview with the New Atheist Sam Harris, the television host Bill Maher, and the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad. Rogan discussed it with the comic Tim Dillon and the lobster-obsessed mystic Jordan Peterson.

The immense fallout from this mild back-and-forth demonstrates that nothing splinters a movement like victory. When the Roganverse could paddle in the safe waters of pronouns, Joe Biden jokes, and COVID conspiracy theories, everyone got along just fine. Life was easier for them when Donald Trump was merely the punkish challenger to the presidency. Now Trump is in the White House, the former upstart independents of the Roganverse are the new establishment, and their desire for power without responsibility is being challenged.

Murray has the kind of English accent that—I’m afraid to say, having experienced something similar myself—instantly makes Americans think you’re smart. He was on The Joe Rogan Experience to promote his new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, which strongly supports Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Later in the episode, Murray also clashed with the comedian Dave Smith, whom Rogan had invited along as a kind of emotional-support podcaster. Smith has been a strong critic of Israel’s policies and military actions, and the pair had a memorable exchange that culminated in Murray asking, incredulously, if Smith had visited the region. “You’ve never been?” he said, with an intonation halfway between Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell and Chandler from Friends.

Murray is hardly a neutral observer of the war; last year, he accepted a medal from Israeli politicians for being their “steadfast ally in countless international press interviews.” But he has spent significant time reporting from the Middle East. And he is right about the shortcomings of Rogan’s guest-booking policy. Over the past few years, Rogan has invited on a horde of crackpots who see themselves as a lone Galileo standing up to Big Pharma or the “deep state.” Nevertheless, his reach, popularity, and patronage powers are so great that few guests want to challenge him; others might reasonably claim that Rogan gets quite enough criticism from the liberal mainstream.

[From the October 2024 issue: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

The split between Murray and Rogan over Israel also reveals a deeper fissure across the American right. Murray believes that the United States has a duty to safeguard freedom and democracy abroad through military action, including support for its allies. Rogan, like Vice President J. D. Vance, is skeptical of this principle in general, and (unlike Vance) unconvinced by its particular application in Gaza.

This crack runs right down the anti-woke sphere, which includes other members of what was once called the “intellectual dark web.” The conservative Substacker Andrew Sullivan has repeatedly criticized The Free Press, founded by Bari Weiss, for what he sees as its reluctance to stand up for the free-speech rights of anti-Israel activists. Two of the most influential voices in tech, the investor Paul Graham and the podcaster turned Trump crypto czar David Sacks, have also publicly clashed over the issue.

Rogan’s show might be a better forum for discussing Israeli-Palestinian affairs if Rogan weren’t so keen on hosting people such as Darryl Cooper—who has argued elsewhere that Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the “chief villain” of World War II—and Ian Carroll, who has claimed on X that “Israel did 9/11.”

This is the crux of the argument between Murray and Rogan: Does the latter’s huge success and influence confer any responsibility or duty on him to patrol the borders of allowable discourse on his show? Rogan says no—he’s just a regular guy who never asked for any of this. His critics retort that his commitment to provocative conversations and dangerous ideas has made him reflexively anti-mainstream, pushing him toward conspiracism.

Instead of making the eminently supportable accusation that the media and the scientific establishment both make mistakes from time to time, Rogan now disparages expertise as a concept. In the episode, Murray admitted that he has struggled to listen to Cooper’s podcasts, because “it’s pretty hard to listen to somebody who says: I don’t know what I’m talking about, but now I’m going to talk.” He then attacked Dave Smith, saying that Smith does the same thing: “Dave’s a comedian, but he’s now mainly talking about Israel.”

Again, this is heresy in the Rogansphere. Expertise is for liberals and cucks and NPCs. Or rather—expertise on politics and history and science is suspicious. Rogan’s guests are allowed to know about sports, for example, from firsthand experience or detailed research. “When it comes to mixed martial arts, his interview guests are the best of the best—the dazzling array of UFC champions, top MMA coaches, respected trainers and other experts does not appear to include comedian Dave Smith,” Rogan’s fellow podcaster and former guest Konstantin Kisin wrote recently. “There is a popular clip on the JRE Youtube channel in which Smith ‘breaks down’ why Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. I was unable to find one of him breaking down BJJ”—Brazilian jiujitsu—“moves, despite Smith possessing a similar level of expertise on both subjects.”

The encounter with Murray, then, exposes the limits of Rogan’s just-asking-questions pose, as well as the problem with delegating foreign-policy discussions to comedians such as Smith, a co-host of Legion of Skanks (tagline: “The Most Offensive Podcast on Earth”). The podcast circuit likes to portray wokeness as decadent—a pursuit of college students, affluent feminists, and activists with no real problems—but this exchange reveals something even darker about its approach. Beyond decadence, this is nihilism: The Roganverse’s “lol nothing-matters” approach to life is possible only for people living comfortable lives in a prosperous democracy, where the worst possible crime is to be a buzzkill.

“I don’t think that the world is a studio in Texas, and we just riff endlessly and things don’t have much meaning,” Murray said afterward, adding: “I think there are things that very much matter, and if they matter, then you put in the work.”

Ever since, the podcast world has experienced levels of sniping that make the Real Housewives franchise look like the Bretton Woods Conference. Nine days and five shows later, Rogan hosted Tim Dillon, another anti-woke comic, and together they impersonated Murray’s voice like middle-schoolers at a sleepover. (“You haven’t beeeeen?”) Here’s an obvious difference between the legacy media and independents like Rogan: You don’t see Anderson Cooper doing mean impressions of his guests the following week. What was the point of Murray traveling to the front lines, Dillon argued, if he just came back with the same opinion as when he’d left?

“How is he in all these wars?” Dillon asked of Murray. “Can I just go to wars?” Yes, Tim Dillon, you can. That’s what all of those people on your television with war reporter written under their name have been doing. In the olden days, we had a tradition where people who wanted to find out stuff spoke directly with people who had firsthand information. You guys laughed at it and said that it was dumb and elitist. Dave Smith, meanwhile, has adopted the fact he’s “neva beeeeeeeeen” as a badge of honor.

[From the January 2025 issue: The ‘mainstream media’ has already lost]

The whole episode has revealed a major break between the members of the Roganverse who still have an attachment to journalism—such as Murray, who is an associate editor of The Spectator, a conservative magazine—and those who regard all information sources as basically equal. “The incentive structures and thought patterns we would typically associate with the entertainment business are not the same as those we would expect to see in journalism or academia,” Kisin wrote in his perceptive post on the controversy. In other words, don’t get your opinions on Israel, or anything else, entirely from stand-up comics, Bigfoot forums, and men named Dave.