Analysis First Draft the Joe Rogan
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Analysis First Draft The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) is one of the highest consumed and most popular podcasts to have ever emerged in social media and culture. With that being said it is also one of the most criticized and distinguished media platforms to be characterized as a podcast. It is a unique show that operates with an open ended style discussion and features new guests on each episode. These guests have included professional athletes, scientists, politicians, billionaires, and even just friends of the show’s creator and host Joe Rogan. Rogan started the JRE in 2013 and by 2015 the show was one of the most viewed podcasts in the world averaging around a million views per episode (Warren). As a fan of JRE, I would say that it would be a difficult task to be a completeist, there are over 1500 episodes and counting in the collection. And Rogan typically dishes out a heavy amount of content with around three episodes a week on average, an attribute to keeping engagement of the JRE audience. Since playing as a leading piece in the surge of podcasting and the formation of culture and subcultures that surround it on Youtube’s medium, JRE has caught the attention of other multimedia platforms looking to make their way into this flourishing industry. Rogan just recently signed an exclusivity agreement for the podcast with Spotify’s company. Katy Warren at Business Insider said that, “Spotify announced in May that Rogan's podcast would be available on the platform starting September 1st, 2020 and that it would become exclusive to Spotify in 2021. The multiyear licensing agreement could be worth upwards of $100 million based on the podcast's performance metrics and other factors…“The Joe Rogan Experience" is downloaded almost 200 million times per month and brought in $30 million last year, making the comedian and UFC commentator the highest-paid podcaster of 2019, per Forbes”(Warren). The signing of this deal could potentially be one of the biggest moves made in the short history of the podcasting industry, and for Spotify’s business. As for Rogan he get to continue on his own course in this deal, Warren wrote, “On the day the Spotify deal was announced, Rogan wrote on Instagram that his podcast will remain free”… “It will be the exact same show,” he said. "It's just a licensing deal, so Spotify won't have any creative control over the show. They want me to just continue doing it the way I'm doing it right now.” The fact that Spotify has made out an agreement like this is a key factor, in my opinion, to truly understanding the significance that JRE holds for the podcasting world, and culture as a whole. It is apparent and valuable to analyze the metaphorical weight that the podcast holds for this industry. And can give a better overall understanding and picture of what ways online culture is shifting and how that has and will make an impact in the future. I think a reason Spotify offered Rogan such a large and long term deal is because they see some of this impact happening now, even if it be only from the lense of more dollar signs for the company, that speaks for something doesn’t it? JRE has an effect on the culture and for those who engage in its content because it offers things in exchange for the time you spend tuning in. Rogan is very good at forming this dynamic and grabbing his audience's attention through his discourse and tone. Each episode of the show is used as a new opportunity for Rogan to talk to someone he is interested in, having conversations with which have some kind of impact on its viewer, may it be big or small. I first came across JRE around my first year of college at Southwestern, and it sparked my interest instantaneously, I was strictly a fan of what the podcast was doing. The first episode that I actually viewed is one that I will be analyzing here in this paper, episode #1216 with guest Sir Roger Penrose. This particular episode is very intriguing and thought provoking as Penrose is a mathematician and quantum physicist who talks about many things the common person, or mainstream media would never hear about without a platform like Rogan has provided. He brings many guests onto his show similar in peculiarity and in their distinctive contributions and expertise in certain industries, businesses, publics and therefore cultures. When watching the Penrose episode I was introduced to a brand new perspective and set of ideas just by listening to this individual. And as a third party viewer of the show I definitely got the impression that Rogan was feeling the same way as me listening to Penrose. The things the two were talking about was very new information for Rogan, as for his audience, and he became a great listener. He seems to ask the right questions at the right time and fosters an environment where free thinking can occur. I believe some of JRE’s success stems from its audiences gravitating towards these somewhat freeing kinds of discussions; where the quality of conversation, understanding, and knowledge is promoted and the rest of the world gets blocked out for that little time. The podcast offers enough equal parts of entertainment, education, motivation and debate to form a relationship with its viewers and keep them wanting to come back and watch more. JRE episodes have an appeal to a very big audience, which is obvious with their popularity, viewers of any given episode could come from simply being fans of Joe Rogan himself, as he’s had a successful and acknowledged career in the entertainment and broadcasting industry prior to his show. But viewers of JRE episodes could also come from the guests' fans and the potential audiences that they are bringing to the platform. Devin Gordon talks about JRE in The Atlantic magazine saying that, “an indifferently received episode will tend to get somewhere around a million views. So many people in the content business right now are trying, and failing, to get the attention of these men, and yet somehow Joe Rogan has managed to recruit a following the size of Florida” (Gordon). There is no doubt that JRE’s followers are heavily slanted towards males, and in this analysis it is necessary to address that in order to fully understand why interpellation and constitutive rhetoric are seen. Comparatively, if I were to do this analysis over a podcast that had a fairly female dominated following, the angle of research and my argument would acknowledge the same facts in order to understand why and in what ways the audience is being affected, and why that particular group is the one being affected. The male dominated space that is the JRE podcast and audience will have some significance in my research as it is important to see why that particular group has gravitated towards this show over others. But what I truly find to be very interesting, intriguing and where I will aim my focus for my research of the podcast and its audience is the cultural formation of different publics and counterpublics around the show, and less concentration on gendered patterns. In my research it is obvious that mainstream and/or popular media and culture has strong opinions against the podcast. JRE is ridiculed across much of the media because it appeals to men more than women, but I do not see this as a bad thing for men to confine in. As is the same for podcasts and other forms of media that are targeted towards females. Devin Gordon had this to say about Rogan in his article for The Atlantic titled, “Why is one Rogan so popular,” where he breaks down why Rogan is such a prevalent figure to people in America, especially men, and why people should start paying attention to it. “Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school guys, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous- girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys” (Gordon). Katie Warren commented on Gordons statements as well in Business Insider saying, “As Devin Gordon wrote for The Atlantic last year, Rogan is particularly appealing to many American men.Rogan is "a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-esophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that," Gordon wrote. "I respond to that. The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain." Many of my popular media citations are in contradiction with the direction I’m taking my argument on JRE which is valuable to dissect. Sadaf Ahsan said in the National Post that “The controversial podcast is one of the biggest with a massive fan following… But here’s the thing: Rogan has long had a habit of spreading misinformation, sharing his own personal feelings and thoughts as facts, and he’s also a very big fan of conspiracy theories. It’s partly why he’s so popular for a very specific brand of fanboy, which Slate once generously described as “freethinkers who hate the left.”And that Spotify deal is entirely related to licensing, which means Rogan has total creative control of each episode he produces.