Joe Rogan and Classical Greek Culture

Violence and Culture

The men who created the culture of Classical Greece were battle-tested warriors. Athenian combat veterans invented philosophy, tragedy and comedy, and built the Acropolis.

Socrates fought bravely as a hoplite infantryman in the Peloponnesian Wars. Aeschylus, who invented tragedy, was renowned for his bravery against the Persians at the battle of Marathon. The general Pericles built the Acropolis as we know it today. Plato was a champion in the Pankration, the ultra-violent Greek contest that combined wrestling and boxing. Its closest modern counterpart is MMA (Mixed Martial Arts). Aristophanes, who invented comedy, was thoroughly familiar with military matters and probably also served as a hoplite in the Athenian army.

Joe Rogan’s experience as a nationally-ranked martial artist, MMA commentator, and stand-up comedian gives him exactly the same background as Plato and Aristophanes. In fact, as the Number #1 podcaster in the world, Rogan’s mastery of long form conversation is a re-invention of the Socratic dialogue for the vast 21^st century audience he has created.

We cannot understand these men without realizing their characters were shaped by their personal experiences with violence. They withstood the fear and suffering of hand to hand fighting and mortal combat, and inflicted pain, injury and death on their opponents. In their own estimation, fighting for their nation was their most important achievement. The tombstone of Aeschylus doesn’t even mention his tragedies:

Here lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion

In the wheat-bearing fields of Gela.

The grove of Marathon witnessed his courage,

And the long-haired Persian knows it well.

ID 37947769 | Greek Warrior © Yiannis Papadimitriou | Dreamstime.com

Is it a coincidence that men who mastered fighting and killing were also responsible for such momentous cultural achievement? Rickson Gracie, the greatest modern fighter with a win-loss record of 450 – 0, believes “Intelligence and fear are very close together.” What could be the connection between violence and great culture?

Courage and Comedy

Author photo

Last week I was in Austin, Texas visiting my son and his fiancé. They invited me to see a show at Joe Rogan’s comedy club The Mothership. The Mothership is a great venue, and the line-up that evening was terrific: Assad Ahmed, Tony Hinchcliffe, Bryan Simpson . . . and Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan was not on the playbill and appeared at the end of the evening as a surprise. The crowd roared when he bounded out on stage. To my surprise, Rogan was the least-funny comedian at the Mothership that night, although admittedly the standard that night was exceptionally high.

In real life, Rogan has the appearance and authentic charisma of a re-born Mussolini. No phones are permitted inside The Mothership and I don’t want to disclose his routine, but generally speaking his jokes were crude, earthy, and sexual, not meant to titillate but to confront the audience with reality.

This line from Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds gives a good sense for Joe Rogan’s routine at the Mothership last week:

“SOCRATES: Well, if a little tummy like yours can create a fart like that, is it surprising that from an infinity of air you can get a mighty roll of thunder?

STREPSIADES: I see; so that’s why we talk about a ‘thunderous fart’!”

The truth is Aristophanes wasn’t that funny, either. Nobody laughs out loud at the wit of Aristophanes—the laughter comes because the audience enjoys the spectacle of the politically powerful—even very threatening—figures of their time being mocked and insulted. In other words, the key ingredient in the comedies of Aristophanes was courage—the courage of the comedian to tell the truth and the courage of the audience to recognize, laughingly appreciate, and applaud it.

Comedy had a major influence on the politics of Athens. In his comedy Knights Aristophanes launched “a virulent and unrelieved attack” on the prominent Athenian political figure Cleon. Cleon was a dangerous man, the leader of the democrats in Athens. Cleon was a warmonger largely responsible for the passionate popular support of Athens’ war with Sparta, which Athens would ultimately lose. Aristophanes showed exceptional courage holding up this bloody blowhard to ridicule.

In his comedy Clouds Aristophanes insulted the rich, unstable and hyper-violent Alcibiades—who repeatedly had his opponents badly beaten or killed—and the play also mocked Socrates at the peak of his influence in Athens, with devastating effect. Years later, when Socrates was placed on trial and condemned to death by the Athenian democrats, the influence of Clouds was a major factor in his death sentence.

The Aristophanes comedy most remembered today is Lysistrata in which Aristophanes dramatized the tragic absurdity and pointlessness of the war between Athens and Sparta. When we recall the divisiveness and intense passions in America kindled by disagreement about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine we can appreciate the fearlessness of Aristophanes. He openly ridiculed those who favored war by imagining a revolt of the Athenian women, who decide to withhold themselves sexually until their husbands agree to negotiate peace with Sparta.

Today, comedy doesn’t have the same political influence it did in Classical Athens, but we too live in a world changed irrevocably by the political energies unleashed by comedy.

The Politics of Humor

Almost exactly fourteen years ago, on 11 April 2011, President Obama publicly humiliated Donald Trump, who was then a private citizen, in a widely publicized and celebrated monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The very fact that the President’s jokes landed time and again as direct hits, while the audience roared with laughter, was one of the factors that made Trump decide to run for President and avenge his public mockery:

President Obama calls forth his Nemesis

One major difference between President Obama’s routine in 2011 and the comedies of Aristophanes 2,400 years earlier was that the most powerful man in the world was mocking a private citizen who had no ability to violently retaliate against his tormentor, while Aristophanes was mocking powerful political figures fully capable of engineering his beating, exile or death.

In other ways, however, that White House Correspondents Dinner and its consequences maps exactly onto Classical Greek notions of hubris and nemesis. Framed in Classical terms, an arrogant President, believing himself immune from any consequences, publicly mocks a rival he despises and perceives to be defenseless, thereby inadvertently calling forth his own nemesis, the one antagonist who can destroy him. In fact, this Classical arc is so perfect that propagandists have since denied any link between the roasting of Trump that night and his election as President five year later in 2016, but it is true.

The parallels between the brand of humor practiced by Aristophanes and Rogan is one element in the way Rogan evokes Greek Classical culture, but it’s also essential to understand the importance of the fact that both Rogan and Plato are champion fighters in the hyper-violent sports of MMA and the Pankration.

The Violent Path to Truth

It’s kind of obvious that our response when we experience violence either reveals us to be a coward or develops our courage. How we choose to handle our fear is why violence has a deeper quality that connects it with the moral courage we find in Aristophanes’ comedy. Violent conflict reveals the naked truth—about ourselves and about the world. Fighting strips away delusions. As Mike Tyson observed, “Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.” Combat reveals the true order beneath the chaos and delusions of life. Fighting for your life is the ultimate motivation to figure out what actually works, not in theory or on social media, but in real life.

Like the men who invented Classical Greek culture, Joe Rogan’s character was shaped by violent experiences. He grew up on the mean streets of Newark in the late 1960s in a poor family on and off welfare, and unable to protect him from the extreme dangers of threatening urban hoods. He moved with his family to San Francisco, and then Florida, and when Rogan was thirteen his family moved to Boston, where Rogan found himself a friendless new guy in a tough neighborhood.

As he tells it in a recent podcast with Jeremy Renner (#2312) about how he chose to deal with the intolerable situation in which he found himself:

“I got picked on a lot, and that’s what drove me into martial arts. I used to hate being scared of people—it just drove me nuts. I didn’t have friends, so a group of guys would fuck with me and I didn’t know what to do, so I was like ‘Okay, I gotta fix this’. So I became obsessed with martial arts. It was the first thing I ever did well, and I said, ‘Hey I don’t think I’m a loser, I just never figured out how to get good at something, and now I’m really good at this one thing, I’m the opposite of a loser . . . . ‘

”That wouldn’t have happened if I lived in a comfortable environment where I wasn’t fucked with, where I didn’t get bullied, I wouldn’t have had that desire to do something that was completely terrifying. Because I was scared of physical confrontation. So what do I do? Spend my whole life getting involved in voluntary physical confrontation with trained fighters. Which is way more terrifying—the most terrifying thing, you know?”

Rogan developed a wicked kick that not only allowed him to successfully defend himself against bullies on the streets of Boston, it earned him black belts in Tae Kwon Do and Karate, and gave him the striking power to become Massachusetts Tae Kwon Do Champion four years in a row, win the US Open Champion in three different weight divisions, and become the runner-up in a National Tae Kwon Do Championship.

Joe’s Devastating Kick

Fighting developed Rogan’s physical prowess but it also shaped his character. There is a nexus in Rogan’s character between courage, comedy and truth that was perhaps first publicly revealed in the Carlos Mencia controversy of 2007, when Rogan was forty. At the time, he was a sitcom actor and a not especially important member of the LA comedy scene. For several years, a much more prominent and successful comedian named Carlos Mencia had been causing growing disquiet among his fellow comedians by plagiarizing their material. They recognized Mencia was using their jokes without giving them the credit, but were too intimidated to complain openly.

Matters came to a head one night at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles when, after finishing his own set, Rogan cracked a joke about Carlos “Men-stealia”—a classic joke in the style of Aristophanes, not very witty but definitely insulting.

Mencia himself was in the audience and stormed the stage, snatched the microphone from the comedian beginning his routine, and challenged Rogan to say it to his face. Rogan came back to the stage and did just that—triggering a full-on shouting match with Mencia that hovered at the very edge of violence. Rogan not only didn’t back down, but he specifically cited jokes Mencia had plagiarized from Bill Cosby and several friends of Rogan’s including George Lopez and Ari Shaffer—and even Mencia’s own friend Bobby Lee.

The confrontation between Rogan and Mencia was videoed on a phone and went viral. Today it is censored from YouTube but available here:

Confrontation at LA's Comedy Store

What physical and moral courage looks like—it’s not pretty

Although he undoubtedly did so unconsciously, Rogan was imitating the public protests of Aristophanes himself against the plagiarism of other comedians who stole his material. In his play Clouds Aristophanes denounces rival playwrights Eupolis and Hermippus just as bluntly and insultingly as Rogan called out Mencia:

“I’m not stuck up, nor yet a smooth-faced cheat

Who pretends a play is new when it is really a repeat:

I always think up new ideas, not one of which is ever

The same as those that went before, and all of them are clever.

I went for Cleon, hard and low, when he was in his pomp,

But never would I have the flat effrontery to stomp

Upon him, once I’d floored him–quite unlike these tedious others

Harping upon Hyperbolus, his failings and his mother’s!

The first of them was Eupolis, the stinking thief,

who bashed Hyperbolus in Maricas,

which was my “Knights” rehashed

(He also plundered “Phrynichus”, though on a smaller scale:

A cordax-dancing drunk old woman, gobbled by a whale.)

Hermippus then and all the rest on one another’s heels

Attacked Hyperbolus–and stole my image of the eels!

If anyone still laughs at them, well, I can’t say I mind

If fools like that to humour such as I provide are blind;

But if my comic novelties receive your approbation,

Posterity will praise the wisdom of this generation.”

If you watch the Clouds-like controversy on the video, it’s apparent other comedians completely agree with Rogan but are too intimidated to confront Mencia. Rogan’s martial arts experience was clearly a factor in his self-confidence. Just as with the Classical Greeks, physical courage was often a prerequisite for moral courage. Moral courage was necessary because Rogan put his stand-up comedy career at risk by telling the truth about Mencia. Rogan was banned from the Comedy Store, whose management considered Mencia more important to their business.

Rogan never looked back.

Violence and Truth

The Mencia controversy, which only accidentally went viral, foreshadowed the defining event in Joe Rogan’s career, his decision to invite the evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein on the Joe Rogan Experience in June, 2020 at the height of the public panic and punitive government measures officially motivated by the goal of mitigating deaths from the novel coronavirus. The Joe Rogan Experience was already popular enough to earn him a $100 million deal to bring his podcast to Spotify (which insulated him from censorship) but Rogan became world-famous because of his decision to openly offer public discourse to Dr. Peter McCullogh, Robert Malone, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and to Brett Weinstein again on episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience that aired between mid-2020 and the December 2021.

Whatever you personally thought about COVID-19 in 2020 - 2021, and whatever your position may be today, hopefully we can agree on the principle that in a free society facts should always be openly discussed. The truth, whatever it may be, does not need to be protected, and it should be arrived at through a transparent process based upon empirical data, reason and logic.

Joe Rogan’s decision to use his podcast as a modern Agora, the place in Classical Athens where free speech was practiced and ideas were openly discussed, was only possible because of Joe Rogan’s previous philosophical development.

Many years ago, I learned personally how violence can motivate us to submit to the discipline of seeking the truth, with a rigour that is truly philosophical, when I was shot. Fortunately for me, the bullet only grazed my knee. I narrowly escaped being crippled, but the gunshot wound was very painful.

The man who shot me was morally in the wrong and I was in the right, but the imperative of understanding a violent experience wouldn’t let me complete my self-scrutiny at the moral level. I also had to acknowledge that while he threatened my brother and cousin with the pistol, I was the one whom he shot. That meant I had made some kind of mistake. At the very least, I had acted in a way that got me shot in the same situation in which my brother or cousin were not. There was a connection between my actions and the violence I suffered, and it was important to be honest with myself about it.

I was shot because I didn’t run. My attacker was mentally deficient twenty-one-year old man living at home with this parents and we were kids. He pointed the pistol at us and ordered us off his front lawn. My brother and cousin turned and ran, and I stood my ground.

On balance, given the fact I was painfully but not severely wounded, I was, and always have been, ok with my decision not to run. The truth was, it was a summer day in California, we were barefoot, and the street we would have to cross was very hot. Was I just stupid, or was I not easily intimidated? Either way, standing my ground expressed values important to me. I had to arrive at that conclusion, however, through a process of rigorous self-examination.

Now, if my actions had caused my brother or my cousin to be wounded instead of myself, it would have escalated the moral stakes and forced an even more agonizing self-examination. But self-examination would have largely focused on questions of my competence or incompetence, how in practice I had failed to protect them or consider their safety. These issues have moral implications, but what I would have had to make peace with—or not—would have been my failure as a practical matter to protect my family from pain or death. The core issue would have been the same if the threat came from a drunk driver or a falling tree branch. Violence forces us to be honest with ourselves at a more essential level than right and wrong.

Violence teaches us to figure out what works. The proof of the truth is its efficacy. If it doesn’t work, or we don’t know yet whether it works, it’s just an opinion. We know the truth by whether or not it works—and violence is a crucible that reveals the truth, because the risk of pain and death sets the stakes so high we have to discover the truth for ourselves.

Fighting requires a disciplined mind. That’s one of the reasons Plato emerged from the hyper-violence of the Pankration to become a great Classical philosopher. As Rogan told Conan O’Brien in 1998 about MMA fighters, “they’re some of the most intelligent guys you ever want to meet. You’d think these guys would be dim-witted, they’ve been knocked around . . . they’re not—they’re really, really, bright guys.”

Joe Rogan on the Conan O’Brien Show - 15 February 1998

Fighters are mentally clear in a way that sedentary intellectuals and social media stars are mostly not, and the reason is because ego in a fight easily results in defeat, injury or death.

Rogan’s passion for real truth is illustrated by how he responded to his first experience with the greatest innovation in martial arts in centuries, the introduction of Brasilian Jiu Jitsu to America in 2000. By this time Rogan was a successful nationally-ranked fighter. Having just watched the first UFC match when Royce Gracie dominated and defeated a much larger and stronger opponent, Rogan showed up at a Gracie studio.

As he reminisced with Royce Gracie himself about that first time:

“I had a completely distorted idea of my ability to fight—completely distorted. And I remember my first class, I was like, ‘Oh boy, now I know,’ . . . . It was so eye-opening: the ideas you had in your head of how competent you were versus the reality that you’re confronted with . . .

The philosophical value of violence, apart from the forcing function it imposes to achieve total clarity about what works and what doesn’t, is the way it also presents the greatest possible temptation to falsehood and to deluding ourselves with over-simplifications.

Violence is the great test of integrity because it creates an urgent imperative to act that can easily lure us into creating false contrasts of black and white in a threatening but ambiguous situation. Joe Rogan discussed this on a recent episode of JRE:

Joe Rogan: “You gotta be able to just say, what it is.”

Jordan Peterson: “A situation can be ugly in a multitude of ways, that’s when it’s difficult to pick your moral pathway forward: your choices are not good.”

Joe Rogan: “Which is often times the case when it comes to conflicts, right? Conflicts are very complicated, and people want it to be binary. They want there to be a good guy and a bad guy, and that’s often times not really the case.”

Jordan Peterson: “It’s hard to organize yourself for combat unless you’re quite convinced you are the good guy. There’s a default to that dichotomy that’s a necessary part of, well, even standing your own ground, otherwise you get demoralized. So I suppose that people, when they’re threatened, default to a simple narrative because you can’t defend yourself, especially physically or militarily, without a pretty cut-and-dried narrative.”

Joe Rogan: “Well, especially military operatives, you know, your life and the people who you’re with, their lives depend on you not having any confusion about whether or not it’s morally correct to be doing what you’re doing. That’s why they like to break it down to ‘kill bad dudes’—real simple. Let’s go. They tell us what to do, we do it. Want to stay alive, you want your team mates to stay alive? It’s what you got to do.”

Jordan Peterson: “You never know when doubt will cause a fraction of a second delay in reaction time.”

Joe Rogan: “That’s always the thing with physical altercations with people, too. You know, often people get sucked into these situations where they’re not sure whether to act or not act, and that’s when they get in trouble.”

Jordan Peterson: “That’s probably true in life. Once you’ve made a decision—well, that’s when it’s necessary to put doubts behind you, otherwise you just act in half measures.”

Joe Rogan: “And often times you have to have done the wrong thing before, like failed to act, or hesitated to act, and it cost you. And then you have to learn that lesson. It’s very difficult to know that, without experiencing mistakes.”

As Rogan and Peterson discussed, violent confrontation can be a crucible for refining the chaos of complicated situations down to the purest and essential truth—which allows us to then act violently to defend or attack. The importance of violence is precisely the ease with which we might fall into self-delusion and error if we haven’t developed an absolutely trustworthy process for deciding the real truth for ourselves. Determining the truth in real life is almost always a murky and vexed process. The risk of imminent pain or death presented by violence forces us outside our minds, requires us to abandon reliance on the speculative process of juggling ideas, and requires us to experiment in real life, knowing the consequences affect our own lives and flesh.

An important implication of the way fighting forces to learn by actual practice is that we will make mistakes. Nobody rides a bicycle perfectly the first time. Nobody passes a basketball to a team mate for the first time perfectly in the heat of a game. True excellence riding a horse requires the disciplined passion of a lifetime. We can delude ourselves that we achieve mastery by passing a written test or uploading a post that goes viral on social media, but real life forces us to acknowledge our inexperience and initial incompetence.

Nobody who has been in fights survives unchanged, physically and mentally. Men and women who learn by fighting are serious, realistic and humble in a way people who have acquired their learning and achievements by studying, and through speech and thought and the approval of others, are not.

Another way of thinking about the lessons acquired in violent conflict is Naval Ravikant’s observation “wisdom is the set of things that cannot be transmitted.” Each of us must acquire wisdom for ourselves by enduring life challenges and learning how to overcome them. The more dire the challenge, the more profound the lessons we learn. Violence presents us with the ultimate challenge.

Peaceful Warriors

What is the best quality fighters and combat veterans introduce to civilization?

I was raised by a combat veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, who had a Masters degree from Georgetown in International Relations and had studied Nuclear Engineering at Columbia. This level of academic credentials were common among the combat veterans I knew when I was growing up. I write this having known dozens of combat veterans and fighters from the generation before me, my own generation, and from the generation younger than me as my family members and friends. These men volunteer as athletic coaches, Cub Scout and Boy Scout leaders, and church helpers. They are husbands, fathers, neighbours and colleagues. They are calm, ethical, thoughtful, courteous men.

ID 54053786 | Annapolis Maryland © Sean Pavone | Dreamstime.com

A minor incident on a summer day in Annapolis, Maryland thirty years ago illustrates the qualities combat veterans bring to society. My wife at the time and I were walking to dinner with good friends of ours, a Delta Operator named Paul and his wife Nina. As we crossed over the Spa Creek bridge, a convertible packed with young men drove past, whistling at our wives and shouting lewd invitations to them.

I was instantly furious.

I’d been in six or seven fights in my life, mostly to defend my siblings or bookish friends from bullies, but a couple times I’d defended myself the way Rogan learned to do in Boston. It had been over ten years since my last fight, but at thirty three years old I wasn’t afraid of another fight. The convertible was probably going stop and park in Old Annapolis and it wouldn’t be hard to find the guys in it.

“Should we get them?” I asked Paul.

He smiled, shrugged, and continued our previous conversation without missing a beat.

Obviously, my fighting experiences were minor compared to Paul’s ultra-intense combat experiences as a Delta Operator. I had lost my fear of fighting but I hadn’t matured as much as I should have. In fact, I probably succumbed to the temptation of knowing that with two of us against the four guys in the convertible, the odds were overwhelmingly in our favour.

Paul was beyond displays of bravado. He had nothing to prove. He was serious in a way I was not. The paradox of fighting and combat experience is that it tempers those who have experienced it and conditions them to choose their fights well and unleash violence very sparingly.

The Joe Rogan Experience

When he began the Joe Rogan Experience in 2009, Rogan already had the practical philosophical training of a fighter which my friend Paul also displayed that summer evening in Annapolis. Rogan was genuinely curious, nurtured a passion for the truth, and he had learned the dangers of indulging his own ego. Perhaps that was why, even at the outset, Rogan accidentally re-inventing the core platform of philosophy, the Socratic dialogue of long-form conversation.

But Rogan was also a guy who had spent his high school career flying around the US fighting in martial arts tournaments. He skipped college altogether. He was intelligent and his mind was capable of making clear decisions under pressure, but he was very poorly educated.

For two years, as his audience grew, there was nothing especially philosophical about Rogan or the conversations over which he presided at JRE. The original podcast was filmed in his den as Rogan smoked weed and talked with his close friends, including the comedian, producer and video director Brian Redban, comedian Ari Schaffir (a prominent victim of Mencia’s plagiarism), the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighter and coach and fellow MMA commentator Eddie Bravo, the comedian and MMA commentator Bryan Callen, the former criminal, prison convict and comedian Joey Diaz, and the comedian, actor and author Tom Segura.

The atmosphere of the early JRE conjured up the lefty 1970s San Francisco of his childhood, because that’s who Rogan really was by his early forties—a crude, satirical, anarchic old-school liberal in the mold of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and his close friend Bill Hicks.

The unconscious parallels to Classical Greece were always there, not just in the free-wheeling, provocative conversational style unfolding for hours as they did in the Agora with Socrates and at Plato’s Academy as Plato immortalized them in his Dialogues. Even the weed-smoking resembles one of Plato’s greatest dialogues, the Symposium. Symposium means “dinner party”, and as Plato describes the participants discussing the various meanings of love they become previously drunker, just as Rogan and his podcasts got high on JRE.

For two years, the hazy air, bro humor, and fighting discussions pretty much was the Joe Rogan Experience. Then Rogan began interviewing a more challenging type of guest. On JRE #137 in September 2011 he interviewed Tim Ferriss, and on the next episode he hosted Anthony Bourdain. Rogan continued branching out, speaking with guests like Sam Harris, and then a year later Rogan interviewed John McAfee for JRE #290. In the conversation with McAfee, Rogan was still very much a sensationalist who kept returning to his personal fixation with McAfee’s lifestyle:

“If you were going to be this incredibly rich guy, which by all accounts you are, living in this country, having a 17 year old girlfriend, which by all accounts you do—and, my friend applauds you—congratulations. Sir, I applaud you as well . . . “ (min. 24)

As the episode progresses, it becomes apparent that McAfee was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice motivated by the Belize government’s desire to extort multi-million dollar bribes. For a while, Rogan focused on the salacious elements in McAfee’s personal life, but towards the end he shows a flash of the future fearless public advocate for freedom of speech when he declares: “This is one of those rare cases, as far as a big news story like yours, when a guy gets to really tell his side of the story.” This was 2012, when the audiences for podcasts was miniscule in comparison to the audiences commanded by the MSM.

Three months later was the episode that marks Rogan’s arrival as a rough-and-ready but genuine philosopher. On episode #312, recorded on 25 February 2013, Rogan had his second conversation with amateur historian Dan Carlin. Listening to it is like listening to the young fighter Plato being taught the rudiments of formal philosophical concepts by Socrates. Carlin is the dominant talker, and Rogan respectfully asks him a series of questions about contemporary American politics. As Carlin explains the concepts and how American political institutions interact, Rogan tentatively but gamely makes comments that reveal a coherent political philosophy that Rogan still lacked the words and political concepts to articulate.

The episode was recorded at the beginning of Obama’s second administration, and Rogan and Carlin sense that something is wrong in America. Inadvertently, as the three hour conversation unfolds, they construct on the fly two of Plato’s key ideas, his Cave myth and the Noble Lie.

I often listen to podcasts when I train on the pull-up bars and Santa Monica rings I built behind our barn. On a cold afternoon this past winter, I happened to choose this episode recorded almost exactly twelve years before. As I warmed up and then began sets of pull-ups and swinging runs on the rings in freezing wind under a darkening sky, I realized I was listening to Joe Rogan becoming a philosopher.

Author Photo

In Book VII of The Republic, Plato compares the human predicament to being held prisoner in a cave since our births, facing a wall and chained tightly to it, so that the wall is all we can see, On the wall we see shadows projected by objects behind us, which are illuminated by a fire we can’t see, either. Plato is saying that what we experience in the world through our senses are only appearances, not reality itself. There are many practical applications of Plato’s distinction between the shadows on the cave and the fire of truth, and one of them is the gap between official politics and actual politics.

Dan Carlin: “Obama was the favorite of guys like Goldman Sachs and Citibank when he was running for office. It’s hard to square his agenda while running that he talked to the people with, with the people who provided the money.”

Joe Rogan: “Yeah, the image that was being portrayed was like nothing we had ever seen before. Ok, he actually is us, he’s the misfit, he’s America, he’s half black, half white, he is raised by a single mom, he is, you know, not from a silver spoon background, he’s a person who’s going to understand the plight of the American people—”

Dan Carlin: “A Constitutional scholar!”

Joe Rogan: “What you have is an issue like Bush to Obama when you see very little change in how we operate—”

Dan Carlin: “Same foreign policy.”

Joe Rogan: “Almost exactly. What is it, then? Who are you? Where’s the change? Where’s the change and where’s the hope? And if there’s only two parties, and you’re both being funded by the same gigantic corporations and banks—Whoa, what really happened here?”

Carlin and Rogan cite many other examples of troubling differences between appearances and reality in American politics. Between them build their own working version of Plato’s “Noble Lie”. Plato’s Noble Lie is a concept from “The Republic”, where he suggests that rulers should tell a foundational myth to citizens to ensure social harmony. In “The Republic”, the citizens are told their social class is determined by having either gold, silver, or bronze in their souls. This “noble” lie is designed to dampen the ambitions and resentments of the middle and lower class citizens and convince them to accept the authority of the ruling class for the good of all.

Both “The Cave” and “The Noble Lie” are about distinguishing between false order and true order. In the Cave, we see only shadows on the wall, a false order, and are unable to see—except with our enlightened minds—the transcendent true order whose distorted reflections we see in our daily lives. The Noble Lie is a false official order which is used to justify imposing by force a certain political system on society by soothing citizens into believing this way to organize is natural and just, whether or not it is.

Dan Carlin: “What do you do in a war that has no end? . . . Who’s going to sign the end of the war treaty and surrender to us so we can return to a normal American situation with checks and balances, and the President doesn’t have extreme authority? That’s the problem. Because we’re in a situation where it’s war time and it’s going to be war time forever.”

They discuss how in the Korean and Vietnam Wars the US Government didn’t declare war and officially enact war time measures domestically (although the FBI and CIA conducted many illegal operations against American citizens). Then, starting with George W. Bush and the Global War on Terror, the US Government did declare war and enacted laws (the “Patriot” Act, which was already drafted and ready for use before the 9/11 attacks) that increasingly suspended the Constitutional liberties of Americans.

Joe Rogan: “So if you want to have total power just start a war.”

The episode is full of many other astute observations that proved completely true in the years 2016 – 2024 and it is worth listening to in its entirety. Its main importance is that it shows how Rogan clarified his own political philosophy. In 2020 this clarity allowed him to stand, almost alone, against the coordinated attempt by the Deep State to impose a totalitarian regime on the United States of America through a fictitious “pandemic” that was used to justify emergency measures that shut down the economy and closed all the major institutions of American life.

In the dark days until Elon Musk bought Twitter and began the process of disclosure that revealed the unconstitutional censorship and surveillance conducted by the US Government, Rogan was the only major voice with an audience his size who made free speech possible in the American Agora. Other courageous institutions and individuals speaking the truth at that time, aside from the Joe Rogan Experience guests already mentioned, included Substack, the culture magazine artifactuals, Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, Dr. Jay Battacharya, Julie Kelly, and Tucker Carlson.

Philosophy as a Way of Life - Diogenes and Joe Rogan

Philosophy isn’t a domain of knowledge, it’s a way of life.

Do I think Joe Rogan is the most influential American philosopher today?

Yes, I do.

Do I think he is the second coming of Plato?

No.

The Classical Greek philosopher Joe Rogan most closely represents is Diogenes. Diogenes was taught by another student of Socrates who antagonistic towards the aristocratic, authoritarian and metaphysical Plato.

Diogenes demonstrating his radical rejection of wealth and status by famously living in a bathtub (actually a ceramic jar). Like Joe Rogan, Diogenes was a gifted performer and provocateur. Diogenes walked through Athens in the daylight carrying a lighted lamp, and when people would ask what he was doing, Diogene would respond, “I’m searching for an honest man.”

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Diogenes and Joe Rogan share a taste for crude, bro humor designed to shake people out of their social conventions. Diogenes defecated and masturbated in public, arguing that everyone did the same thing, they just hid themselves when they did it.

Rogan’s style too is to be extremely frank, as I witnessed last month at his wonderful Mothership venue in Austin. Another representative example is the JRE episode when Rogan discussed getting accidentally kneed in the groin during martial arts training. In the locker room afterwards, Rogan discovered that his jockstrap was full of blood. When he urinated he passed blood but decided not to seek medical attention. He waited another day to see if the condition would improve. Then, as Rogan explains on the podcast, he masturbated into a toilet to see if his penis still functioned properly, and was relieved to confirm that it did. Rogan is a modern peer of Diogenes.

Diogenes also had a relationship with Plato similar to Joe Rogan’s confrontational relationship with Mencia. Once Diogenes entered Plato’s home while Plato was having lunch. Diogenes contemplated the elegant tableware with which Plato was dining and announced, “A philosopher living on olives doesn’t need such luxury.” Diogenes also trampled on Plato’s fine carpets and declared, “I trample on Plato’s vainglory.” Plato’s excellent riposte, worthy of a comedian like Bill Hicks, George Carlin—or Joe Rogan, was “How much pride you expose by pretending not to be proud!”

Diogenes was a man of courage, who was ready to die for his beliefs. Alexander the Great conquered the city where Diogenes lived and, having been trained by Aristotle, decided to find the famous philosopher in his jar. Alexander marched through the streets accompanied by his bodyguard of special forces troopers until he found Diogenes sunbathing. Alexander offered to grant Diogenes any wish he might have.

Diogenes replied, “Stand a little to the side, you’re blocking my sun and casting a shadow on me.” Diogenes knew his impudent response put his life at risk.

In a similar situation, the great scientist and engineer Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier. Archimedes had drawn circles in the sand as one of his engineering studies, and the soldier walked right through them. Archimedes looked up, startled, and rebuked the soldier for leaving footprints in his diagrams. The soldier killed him on the spot.

Alexander, however, was so impressed by the courage of Diogenes and his authentic indifference to wealth and power that he stepped back to let the sun shine on Diogenes again, and walking away, said, “If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes.”

Conclusion

The affinities between Diogenes and Joe Rogan are clear: the men are ancient and modern combinations of performance artist and stand-up comedian—with unusual courage to speak the truth, regardless of the risk.

The unique excellence of Classical Greek culture originated in the life-and-death conflicts experienced by the men who created that culture. Today’s trivial, delusional, worthless culture is produced by people who have experienced only the most trivial of life challenges. To return again to Mike Tyson, his position is that social media has made people “way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.”

The same observation could be made about our politics. The United States of America was founded by men who understood the risk of violence. They “pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor” to one another, or as Benjamin Franklin said with his charactetistic pithy wit, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”

When Rogan appeared in the world on August 11^th 1967 in the wrong part of Newark, he seemed destined for obscurity and perhaps an early death. His determination to defend himself on the streets of Boston set him on a path where he transcended the role of a victim, proved himself in violent conflict, achieved a lucrative if fairly inconsequential career as an actor, and then reinvented the Socratic dialogue through his podcast the Joe Rogan Experience, achieving wealth and global fame.

Disagree with him or not, Joe Rogan is our Diogenes and Aristophanes, a seasoned fighter and modern master of the Socratic dialogue.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Special thanks to

CansaFis Foote

for his insightful and trenchant insights into an earlier draft, and to

Michael Dean

for making available his

Essay Architecture

AI to analyze drafts of this essay.