The Joe Rogan Experience – How He Built a Podcast Empire

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Featured: Joe Rogan, Brian Redband, Michelle Faller, Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders, Kanye West

What’s in This Episode

• Joe Rogan’s transition from TV to podcasting
• The Joe Rogan Experience launch on Christmas Eve 2009
• How comedians shaped Rogan’s podcast approach
• Early adoption advantages in podcasting
• Joe Rogan’s interview with Elon Musk in 2018
• Long-form conversation vs. traditional media format

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Caloroga Shark Media. Hey there, I’m Johnny Mac, and on Saturdays this summer, I’m doing deeper dives on single topics. Today, let’s talk a little about Joe Rogan. And the thing that gets lost in every conversation about Joe Rogan is that he’s a comedian, that was a comedian, is a comedian. Now you might not think he’s the best comedian.

Maybe he’s not, but he’s a comedian. The way he runs the podcast, the way he talks to guests, the way he thinks about things, the way he’s built the whole thing. It’s all shaped by being a comedian. And what I mean by that is his whole career was shaped by being in rooms. We’re the only thing that matters is whether something’s actually interesting or actually funny.

You can’t fully understand the Joe Rogan experience without understanding that the person at the center of the Joe Rogan experience thinks like a comedian, which means he thinks about authenticity the way most media executives think about ratings, which is to say, it’s the only metric that actually matters to him. And a lot of times those two things are in opposition. TV never quite figured out what to do with Rogan. He did News Radio, remember that. Yeah, it’s a funny show.

People remember it fondly. He was good in it, but he’s not the thing you think about when you think about news radio. He was a comedian doing TV rather than a TV person. Then he did Fear Factor. It’s its own strange chapter, a show that was watched by tens of millions of people, made him a household name in a very specific way.

Fear Factor, Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan experienced Joe Rogan are the same person if you look closely enough. But the mainstream audience that knew him from Fear Factor had no reason to think he was going to become the most influential media property in the next two decades. Joe Rogan was the guy who made people eat bugs. This is so wrong. Come on, this is for your charity.

Might be a little bitter, but go for it. It’s free charity. Does it taste like? Yeah, don’t tell us what it tastes like. What they missed and all that was Joe Rogan’s genuine intellectual curiosity.

I was recently listening to the episode with Michelle Faller at a point, So I was one of if Joe had checked out, and then I realized no, he was just taking it all in as they talked about the space and science of a great episode. If the Earth was the dot of an eye in a book in regular print, that the Milky Way Galaxy would be as large as the Earth itself. Actually a little bigger. Yeah. So, I mean the thing is, this is an interesting thing about science communication.

If the Sun were the size of a dot of an eye, and you’ve got to remember, you can fit a million earths inside the Sun. This is a huge thing. So if that’s the size of a dot of an eye and untext, then the galaxy would be the size of the Earth. That’s when people’s eyes get big and people. Respond to so it’s not just the Earth the sun.

So if the Sun was the. Dot of an eye, yeah, that’s right. So make this clear. So the Sun were the size of a dot of an eye on a page of text, so you could fit a million earths inside that dot of an eye, then the Milky Way Galaxy would be bigger than the Earth. Yeah.

So if the Earth was the dot of an eye, then because the Sun is how many millions earths. The volume wise, you could fit over a million earths inside the sun. Yeah. Yeah, the sun is about eight hundred thousand miles across. You could fit about one hundred and ten earths across it the diameter.

We do those things where you show the differences between our sun and different stars and immense stars, and you go bigger and bigger and bigger, and you get to the point where you’re like, I can’t this is not working. Get I can’t process this. It’s too coooky. There’s nobody that can process it. The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode number one, guest Brian Redband, December twenty fourth, two thousand and nine.

What an interesting time to launch a show. Christmas Eve now two thousand and nine is early. We only got iPhones in two thousand and seven. And if you were into podcasts in those early days, and I was, you couldn’t actually download a podcast to your phone. You had to get it on your laptop and then connect your phone with a cord to the laptop and move some podcasts over.

So back in those early days, when I was listening to things like this or a Hardwick an artist, you had to like really do it. Start broadcast and then update, update to Twitter, and then I always like to watch my own channel, so let’s go to your own channel so you can see what the chat is and then update year internet tonight, update my own or go through the faster one. You’re gonna get addicted to. Oh nice colors. Pretty So two thousand and nine is pretty early to start a podcast, and a lot of the people that really were the big names did start early.

That’s not to take away from them, but there’s obviously an advantage to being an early adopter. You know, Maren definitely was an early adopter, again, not taking away from anyone. So two thousand and nine, the idea that a podcast could be a primary media property that can compete with TV or radio ad dollars, Yeah, we couldn’t even do. It’s called dynamic insertion. Now, like you know, if you’re in I don’t know, if you’re listening to Portugal, serve you local ads targeted at you in Portugal back in the day.

And I started podcasting in twenty fifteen, which was kind of the start of round two. The ogs give us a lot of crap for getting in late, but you know, here eleven years later, I feel like I got in early. Anyway, you couldn’t do dynamic insertion advertising. You had to actually bake the ads in. But Rogan wasn’t thinking about a media company.

He was thinking about it as a comedian who wanted to have long conversations with interesting people and had figured out a way to record and distribute those conversations for free. The early episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience or a document of someone figuring out a format in real time. They’re loose. They have a feeling of someone who’s experimenting rather than executing. Early guests are people who were part of the La comedy ecosystem that Rogan was part of.

The early episodes have the energy of a thing that doesn’t yet know where it’s going. Where nobody’s performing for an audience, because the audience is a little smart enough that performing for it would feel absurd. Now, if you look back at who Rogan had on and when, you can get a map before the culture was heading, before the mainstream caught up. He had Elon Musk one in twenty eighteen, before Musk had become the figure he is now. You know, a cool scientist guy that’s going to build a mores Base.

Well the electric car is that guy? Yeah? Yes. I think one of the issues with social media that’s been pointed out by many people is that, I think, maybe particularly Instagram, people look like they have a much better life than. They really do.

Right, So, by design, yeah, people are posting pictures of when they’re really happy. They’re modifying those pictures to be better looking. Even if they’re not modifying the pictures, they’re at least selecting the pictures for the best lighting, the best angle. So people basically seem they’re way better looking than they basically really are, right, And they’re way happier seeming than they really are. So if you look at everyone on Instagram, you might think, man, they’re only happy, beautiful people, and I’m not that looking, and I am not happy.

That conversation got watched and shared in a way that a TV interview never would have because it was three hours long and Rogan let must be weird and interesting instead of trying to fit him into a seven minute window. Rogan had on Bernie Sanders, he had on Kanye he had scientists, fighters, comedians, authors, conspiracy theorists, doctors who disagreed with other doctors, and he treated all of them more or less the same way, which to say he was genuinely curious about what they thought and asked follow up questions and didn’t try to trap anyone to score points. That format, long curious, non adversarial, was unusual in the media in the early twenty ten still unusual today. Cable news had trained everyone to expect conflict and interruption. Talk shows were in seven minute segments.

Even in PR, had you know that? NPR kind of air to it that shaped how the questions got asked and how you answered. Rogan didn’t have any of that. He had a comedians framework, which is what’s interesting here and how do we get to it? Those are different questions what a journal leuts asked, and they produce different conversations.

And part of the audience that found the Joe Rogan experience did so because they were hungry for that kind of conversation and weren’t finding it anywhere else. Personally, it’s why I love the show. Joe is genuinely curious. Sometimes I don’t agree with anything he’s saying or what the guest is saying, but I always find the conversations interesting to listen to because they’re calm.

Let’s talk about the comedians.

When Joe Rogan had Bill Burr on, those conversations functioned as a masterclass and how comedians think about their work. Same with Louis C.K. Same with Chappelle. They weren’t promotional appearances. The guests were there to talk about comedy in the road, what it’s like to do the thing they do, and they talked for as long as the conversation was interesting.

By twenty fifteen or so, the podcast was the biggest in the world by any meaningful measurement, still considered to be the number one podcast. The advertising model was working. Rogan was doing host red ads. Advertisers were paying for them because the audience was enormous and loyal in a way that podcast audiences tend to be. But the mainstream media was still condescending, treating the Joe Rogan experience as a curiosity, still not reckoning with the fact that what people were listening to Rogan every week then were watching most cable news programs.

The industry was still writing think pieces about whether or not podcasts were a real medium. Comedians understood what Joe had built. A Rogan appearance moved tickets in a way that a late night appearance no longer did. Getting on Rogan was the thing, not getting on Conan or Kimmel or Comedy Central. Rogan.

Some of the comedians who arguably Joe made their career, Sigora Kreischer, Andrew Schultz, She and Gillis. Then the Spotify deal in twenty twenty one hundred million dollars later reported to be closer to two hundred million for exclusive rights to the Joe Rogan experience. Suddenly the media was like, hey, wait, what a guy’s talking to people in a studio is worth two hundred million dollars to Spotify. Don’t forget. Spotify is a company that has access to data about podcasts listening and made that deal with full information about what they were buying.

Rogan was eleven years in At that point. It wasn’t a bet on what he might become. It was an acknowledgment of what he was reading. He was the largest and most influential audio media property in the world. Built without a network, without a studio, without a development deal, no big company behind it, just a comedian who wanted to have conversations with interesting people and figured out how to distribute them.

That deal did create some friction. People would listen to the podcast on their regular app, now how to listen to it on Spotify. That’s when I started listening a little less because I don’t love the Spotify app.

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Also, the show was moved off YouTube at that point, so there’s some audio dis…

I know, personally, if I heard enough buzz on an episode, I’d go listen to it on Spotify. But you know, for the most part, I skipped a lot of those years. Then covid comes along and some controversies. Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify to protest Joe Rogan’s COVID episodes. That became a whole cultural moment.

In early twenty twenty two, there were calls for Spotify to drop Rogan entirely. Spotify stock dropped Spotify put Good Content Advisor on some episodes. They issued a statement they kept the deal intact. The cultural pressure that was supposed to make Rogan radioactive basically no effect on the one thing Spotify cared about, which was whether or not people kept pressing play. Eventually, the Spotify deal was redone so that you can now listen to the show on any app or on YouTube.

Just like we did in olden times.

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And then there’s the political aspect to this.

Joe always had on political guests, for example, Bernie Sanders. In twenty twenty, politicians realized they could reach young men who don’t watch cable news, who don’t read political newspapers. By twenty twenty four, the show had become something that presidential campaigns felt they needed to engage with. At least one of them did. Donald Trump came on in October twenty twenty four, sat with Rogan for three hours.

No prepared questions, no handler, no seven minute segments, just Rogan and Trump talking the way Rogan talks to everyone, with genuine curiosity and without the adversarial framework that defines most political interviews. It was really like two different lives. You know. I had a very wonderful life, but I wanted to do this. The Apprentice was still going very strong.

We had twelve seasons, and we had actually fourteen seasons twelve years over. They had a couple, well, they canceled The Apprentice when you were running for president. Correct. No, they had Arnold Schwarzenegga do it. I was involved in that, and I had enough of it, and we did great.

It was doing great, but they wanted me to stay. They all came to see me. They said, we’re going to give you a contract. They wanted to extend my contract. Mark Burnett is a great guy.

Then they wanted to extend the contract. Mark said, you’re crazy. Don’t run. Don’t run. Nobody gives up prime time.

They said, you know, it’s one of those little things, which is probably true. Nobody gets for the most time for being president. For running well, for running against twenty some ORed people, you know. It turned out to be eighteen eighteen professional people, you know, mostly politicians. The episode got something like forty million views in the first few days.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’s campaign made the decision not to go on Rogan. In October of twenty twenty five, Harris told the Diary of a CEO podcast, I wanted to do Joe Rogan Show, and there were a lot of games being played, but I wanted to do Rogan Show. There was some claim in a book that the Harris campaign had rearranged her schedule for a possible appearance on the show, but were told that Joe was taking a personal day, which turned out to be the same day Rogan interview. Trump. Rogan fired back, saying Harris and her team never agreed to an appearance on the podcast.

Joe also said that the Harris team wanted him to travel from Austin to New York to do the interview. On The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe said he wanted to do Trump and Harris on the same day. That was my goal. I even offered to do it late that same night, the night Trump came on. I’m like, what if we do her while she’s in Houston, if she came here, But no one ever committed to doing it.

This is really important because they keep pretending like I lied. Harris said on a subsequent podcast appearance that she wanted to go on Rogan show but was advised not to because they assumed. As it turned out to be correct. It says the quote that he was supporting Trump and that it would not be a productive piece for me. But just like when I went on Fox News with Brent Beher, my perspective was they might have their bias, but there are people who listen who are open minded, and I’m going to go there and give them a chance to get to know me and make my case to them.

So that was my perspective on Joe Rogan, just like it was from my perspective on Fox. She concluded of the topic, I definitely regret that we didn’t do it. You start a podcast in two thousand and nine because you want to talk to your comedian friends for three hours. Fifteen years later, presidential campaigns are making strategic decisions about whether or not to appear on your show. Joe Rogan experience still number one.

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