The ‘manosphere’ of influence - Joe Rogan’s part in Trump’s win

The president-elect’s unorthodox media strategy was mocked but pandering to anti-woke podcasters certainly paid off.

Joe Rogan and Donald Trump.

To describe 2024 as the first podcast election would be an exaggeration. But not, I think, much of one. Podcasts have exploded in popularity even since the last US election and are now perhaps the most formidable and underrated force in the online media. Anybody who doubts this should take note of Trump’s victory rally, which featured a shoutout to the “mighty and powerful Joe Rogan”.

Allies of the 45th (and soon to be 47th) president evidently believe that he owes at least part of his victory to Rogan. They are very plausibly correct in that analysis.

The Democrats played impeccably by the old rules: expensively produced television adverts, a much-eulogised ground operation in the swing states, phalanxes of eager volunteers sallying forth to pound pavements and knock on doors. Trump, meanwhile, made a much-mocked tour of young male anti-woke podcasters: Theo Von, Lex Fridman, Logan Paul. Each of these men commands an audience in the tens or hundreds of millions. Trump’s appearances were greeted in many quarters of the media with (often understandable) bemusement and hilarity. Why was a former president of the United States reassuring the former martial artist Paul that aliens “would never be able to take you in a fight” or discussing the benefits of psychedelic drugs with Fridman, or quizzing Von on his cocaine habit ("that’s down and dirty, right?").

But these men all speak to a crucial Trump constituency: less-educated young men disaffected with progressive politics. And amid their chuckling at the weirdness of the spectacle, many commentators failed to notice how natural Trump’s rapport with these characters was. The world of American “manosphere” podcasting is one of never-ending braggadocious anecdotes, awed worship of business success and free-wheeling conspiracist speculation. Trump could hardly have been more at home. It has often occurred to me that had he been born 40 years later Trump himself might have been a podcaster.

Undoubtedly his most important appearance was on The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan, 57, is the founder and the king of this world of male podcasters. The extent of his influence can scarcely be overstated. His show is downloaded 200 million times a month. It is the most popular podcast not only in America but also in Britain. Rogan’s three-hour interview with Trump has been watched 45 million times on YouTube alone. It probably attracted a similarly huge audience on Spotify, though the company doesn’t publish listening figures. TV executives dream of numbers like these.

Rogan specialises in very long (to sceptical listeners, interminable) free-form interviews. Some go on for four hours or more. His previous guests include Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson and Alex Jones, but a great deal of the show consists of Rogan shooting the breeze with comedians and mixed martial arts fighters. The spirit is part California woo-woo (psychedelic drugs, floatation tanks, mushroom powder coffees), part starry-eyed tech-worship and part old-school blue-collar politics.

Rogan’s distinguishing characteristic is that he is open-minded to a fault. His genius as an interviewer is his ability to summon up a sincere (and often credulous) fascination with almost anyone his producers put in front of him: businessmen, kickboxers, social scientists, philosophers, shamans. The guests he most respects are know-it-all alpha males or credulous goofballs willing to indulge wild speculation about (a perennial Rogan theme) the existence of aliens.

Unsurprisingly, Trump and Rogan got along well. The hyper-confident Rogan even seemed a little starstruck, treating Trump with unusual deference and solicitude. This was not Trump’s most eccentric podcast appearance. Rogan managed to stay off aliens, floatation tanks and psychedelics and keep (mostly) to conventional political subjects. The questions were all softballs. Trump had the benefit of a huge audience and free rein to boast about his accomplishments ad nauseam: “We had the greatest economy in history ... we had the best economy ... nobody could even believe it” etc. Harris declined to appear on the show. Wisely, I think. It is hard to imagine she would have felt comfortable on it.

It was still something of a surprise when, shortly before the election, Rogan formally endorsed Trump. The endorsement mattered partly because Rogan is not (or, at least, was not) a partisan. A few months ago he ruffled Trumpist feathers by seeming to endorse the conspiracy theorist third party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr. And until quite recently his show was authentically, sprawlingly heterodox in its political sympathies. With his genial lack of discrimination, Rogan was willing to flirt with ideas from all over the spectrum, from red-blooded libertarianism to European-style social democracy (sometimes in the space of a single episode).

Not long ago Rogan could be heard fretting about climate change, eulogising Bernie Sanders (who appeared as a guest), expressing his horror of the January 6 riots ("Donald Trump is so f***ing dangerous") and endorsing left-wing positions such as universal basic income and free college education for all. “I would like to spend more on taxes if they can fix inner-city communities,” he once remarked. He used to speculate fondly about Michelle Obama running for the presidency: “She’s great ... she’s the wife of the greatest president we had in our lifetime.”

Rogan’s drift towards Trump mirrors the political journey of many of the disaffected young men who listen to him. It seems to have been driven principally by a frustration with the excesses of progressive politics, which has been a running theme of The Joe Rogan Experience since about 2020. That frustration eventually soured into hostility and contempt. And as Rogan’s peers in what is sometimes referred to as America’s “intellectual dark web” of heterodox thinkers and talkers moved towards the Republicans it seemed increasingly inevitable that he would do the same. Trump will be very pleased he made the journey. I suspect his recent visit to Rogan’s studio will not be his last.

The Times