3 May—Last week, during spare moments while preparing dinner, I listened with obsessive interest to Joe Rogan’s podcast interviews of Graham Hancock, Dennis McKenna, Randall Carlson, and Dr. Rick Strassman, spellbound by the wide-ranging conversations on human consciousness, history, psychedelics, chemistry, ethnobotany, anthropology, archeology, and geology, among other topics. It was an indulgence of some of my more arcane areas of interest—and a damn lot of fun.
Rogan is an impressive interlocutor. He asks intelligent, often penetrating questions and then sits silently, allowing his guests to expound uninterrupted on the subjects that most fascinate them or on the latest developments in their fields of expertise. Lively conversations invariably ensue. Most interviews are about two hours, though some have exceeded three. I rarely have the time to devote to an entire episode even when watched over the course of several days. But even a few minutes of a Rogan podcast can open the mind to other ways of thinking and seeing the world.
One advantage of Rogan’s format is the staggering breadth and depth of the conversations that unfold. Rogan very often serves a delicious and nutritious feast for the mind. I’ve listened to interviews with film maker Oliver Stone, journalist Glenn Greenwald, whistleblower Edward Snowden, biologist Bret Weinstein. There’s usually something to savor, even if you don’t want to partake of every course or you don’t like an item being served.
By comparison, the simplistic soundbites that dominate news and social media, and that have fractured our attention spans, are calorically empty sugar hits purposefully crafted to confirm established beliefs, prejudices, and world views while stifling curiosity. They serve the intended function of maintaining loyalty to the status quo. Rarely do they challenge.
It was two years ago that I listened to my first Rogan podcast—a fascinating interview with renowned mycologist Paul Stamets—long after Rogan had become a podcasting phenomenon. Like many people, I’d heard and believed all the negative rumors about the man: He was racist, sexist, a rightwing conspiracy theorist. It was when I watched the documentary Fantastic Fungi and wanted to know more about Stamets, whom Rogan had interviewed several years earlier, that my curiosity finally got the better of my prejudice.
In truth, Rogan is an intellectual outlier. The topics of his programs are wide ranging: comedy, health, psychedelics, lost civilizations, and mixed martial arts. But also dissident journalism and the abuses of government and powerful institutions. Rogan and his guests frequently undermine establishment narratives. The very best of his programs expose the corruptions of government and corporations, the military industrial complex, and academia.
Rogan inhabits a media landscape far outside the mainstream and is powerful enough that those who fear his influence have been unable to censor or cancel him. Not that they haven’t tried.
What makes Joe Rogan so dangerous is his curiosity and the fact that he’s willing to follow his curiosity to many different places. Rogan has been denigrated and attacked because nothing is more frightening to the establishment than someone who questions things and pursues knowledge, no matter where it leads them.
I don’t always agree with Rogan or his guests. But listening to Joe Rogan has encouraged me to be more curious and open-minded. After all, the point of being alive is to grow and learn, to stretch the mind as well as the body, to be engaged with other people and points of view. Curiosity is one of the great joys of being human.
Note: I offer this contemplation on curiosity at a time when censorship is on the rise in the United States. Social media giants are being used by government to cancel and censor people who question mainstream narratives on everything from the war in Ukraine to the origins of COVID-19. Facile and false allegations of being racist, fascist, right-wing, or a conspiracy theorist are now commonly leveled against people in order to discredit and silence them. We have entered another era of McCarthyism in which fear of Russia and China has once again been weaponized as a potent propaganda tool to justify censorship, domestic surveillance, increased authoritarianism, and obscene levels of defense spending. All of which are pushing us ever closer to nuclear war. Curiosity has rarely been more important.
Cara, very well said, with an eloquent profundity in your important narrative which you nailed correctly!
On Joe Rogan, I suppose I missed out on many of his interviews which my cousin would forward via email. I thought he might have been another right-wing type, so I usually deleted them without watching the interview, so shame on me for "pre-judging" him.
And Paul Stamets too! I've heard Stamets many times over the years on kpfa.org during their listener-sponsored fund drives, and finally sent for his book, Fantastic Fungi, for Paul's encyclopedic knowledge and to help keep the radio station on the air.
What you said in the article is the sad and seriously dangerous course our government, along with the big corporate media, the Merchants of Death industries, plus the Wall Street crowd and the Big Bankers of the Federal Reserve , all of them in cahoots for their nefarious quest for more money and power, which is insatiable, and may lead to a nuclear war.
Your last paragraph touched me, as my late wife would say, and she may have quoted someone from the past, that "A non-curious life is not a life worth living." Too many folks have one-track minds and prefer not taking the time to read and research before accepting the official version of whatever, by the above-mentioned groups. Skillful propaganda can lead a nation to unintended consequences which they'll regret, but I often say: Once you pull the trigger, it's to late to stop the bullet.
It's much worse now, with all the social media outlets then it was during the McCarthy era, as the propagandists have had plenty of time in honing their skills. The Black Magicians of 20th century Amerika!
I don't expect to agree with anyone all the time. I don't even agree with myself all the time.