Speaking with Joe Rogan

Ideological capture, free speech, Donald Trump, and more—with America's podcast king.

Last week, I traveled to Austin, Texas, to meet America’s podcast king, Joe Rogan. This was my debut appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, the top podcast in the country, and it was worth the trip. Joe and I discussed parenting, free speech, Donald Trump, Alex Jones, dealing with haters, racking up wins, and much more.

There’s a simple reason Rogan’s show resonates so deeply with so many people: Joe is not an ideologue. He is simply a seeker of truth. He is willing to observe and to describe what has become difficult, even impossible, for some people to say in public. I’m grateful for his voice and for his having me on the program.

The following are lightly edited highlights from our discussion.  

Raising Kids in a World Without Rules

Christopher Rufo: We’ve raised a generation of kids for whom saying no and imposing limits is something that we can’t do. It’s this idea of liberating ourselves from all limits, but some limits are necessary. Some limits are important.

Joe Rogan: The way you raise children can be applied to a society. You need structure. You need rules. You need love and compassion. You need examples of good behavior. You need all those things. But when you let people cook meth in the middle of the street, that all goes out the window.

I love when they use terms like “the houseless.” I saw two politicians in two different speeches talk about protecting “minor attracted persons.” You’re talking about pedophiles.

Rufo: We’re training kids to believe everything behind them is evil. We’re creating a generation of anxious, depressed, suicidal, confused kids who have been deprived of structures that could help them.

Rogan: If you want to develop human beings who can reach their full potential in this life and be a fulfilled human being, you’ve got to teach them to work hard. We’re just creating a bunch of grownup babies who are screaming in the streets, “Stop oil now,” blocking the highway with signs painted with oil, wearing sneakers made with oil, and everything they own was shipped by a truck powered by oil.

Rufo: When you try to wipe away all existing values as somehow oppressive or racist or patriarchal, you’re dooming people who need to grow up in a world where they know north from south, up from down. Because life is a fight. Life is a struggle. They’re going to confront very difficult things as they grow up, and then at some point you hope that you’ve prepared them enough.

Life as a Thought Criminal

Rufo: It’s so important to stop playing the game and to say: You know what? I’m going to tell the truth, and I’m going to take the slings and arrows because I know that public opinion is on my side and people fear speaking out, but they need representation. That to me is the name of the game.

Rogan: During the 1960s and the 1970s, when Marxism was gaining momentum in the United States, they were completely ignoring what happened in the gulags. They were completely ignoring what happened in Cuba. They had this very rosy perception of communism, which always leads to military dictatorship. It’s like the idea of “I know everybody dies of rabies, but I don’t think I’m going to die of rabies.”

Rufo: In my 20s I traveled through a lot of the former Soviet Union Socialist Republics. It’s an ideology that seeks conquest, generates failure, and then seeks more conquest. It is the most depressing, gray, dismal, haunted kind of place you can be. Soviet-bloc housing. You see people strewn on the road freezing to death in the winters. There’s no economic productivity, there’s no culture. The Soviets evaporated their religions and all their old customs. They’ve been annihilated. Bad ideas have bad consequences for societies.

Rogan: Logic has just been blown by the wayside because the very people in charge of educating young minds have completely abandoned that task and are now focused on promoting this ideology that must be adhered to.

Rufo: It’s not trivial to say that we’re beyond some of those limits and some of those constraints that make a democratic form of government meaningful.

Rogan: People have always been rude. Are we going to legislate against rudeness? Are we going to say that if someone decides to call me Mrs. Rogan, I can get them arrested and locked in a cage for being rude to me because they’re calling me a girl?

Rufo: The people who have created little nests of power with this ideology have never been challenged. No one in a meeting says, “Actually, this is a stupid idea. We should get back to business.” It was this remarkable realization that we’ve created this social and psychological pattern within our institutions where they’re fragile, brittle, unhinged, because the most passive-aggressive, the most ideological, the most nagging person ends up winning.

Rogan: You’re turning the whole world into this unfixable, systemically racist, chaotic scene that you must go out and mend, and you have to mend it through DEI, and you have to mend it through equality of outcome, and you have to mend it through, “Tax the rich.”

Never Let a Societal Collapse Go to Waste

Rogan: There’s never been a moment in time where so much of society collapsed so quickly. If you wanted to create a perfect recipe for a collapse of a society, you would have a president who’s not there. You would have a society that is run by maniacs in the educational institutions, and when Antifa commits violence, it’s “mostly peaceful,” but when anyone else does it, it’s racist. This is a recipe for a civil war.

Rufo: This is a contest where Democrats are saying, “we have to destroy democracy in order to save democracy.” If they can wipe out someone like Donald Trump, they’re going to have no hesitation because once they cross the Rubicon, metaphorically speaking, that’s when dissent becomes a crime.

Rogan: I would like to see what the stats are on older postmenopausal women with no children and how they lean politically. The women I know who are Republican, they’re almost all moms. There’s a lot of young, hot Republican women who are social influencers now, too, which is hilarious.

Rufo: The next wake-up call is going to be 2020 a hundred times over. We’re all getting ready for when the house of cards falls over and it’s revealed that none of this is sustainable. The fundamentals of our country – institutional, financial, political – cannot hold, and that fact can’t be covered over with ideology anymore.

Rogan: The answer to bad speech has always been better speech. But now you’ve got people who will ban your account if you use a person’s name that they used to have when they were a man. At the same time, you have the Taliban on Twitter! Elon Musk has done a service for the human race by purchasing that platform. Him purchasing Twitter is one of the most important things that’s ever happened to us, in terms of pushback.