Chapter 1The Boy Who Moved

Foreword

For most of my working years the future had an address. It was a low building off a highway in Mountain View where a language model was being trained on a corpus the size of the readable internet. It was a flat of scrubland in South Texas where a rocket the height of a fifteen-story building stood venting nitrogen into the morning. It was a whiteboard in a converted London warehouse where a room full of people who had been the sharpest in their doctoral cohorts argued about reinforcement learning. I wrote about those rooms for the better part of a decade, for the magazines that cover such rooms. What the rooms had in common was intention. The people in them had drawn the future deliberately, on funding rounds and roadmaps and mission statements, and they meant every line of it.

Then a garage in the San Fernando Valley, on Christmas Eve of 2009, with two hundred dollars of microphone equipment on a folding table and a friend sitting across from it. No roadmap. No mission statement. No funding round. The man who pressed record that night was a stand-up comedian and a cage-side fight commentator who has said, in the years since, that he was only curious, that he only wanted to keep talking to interesting people, that he had no idea what the thing would become. What it became was the dominant broadcast format of the attention age. That sentence is the reason for this book.

I came to Joe Rogan the way you come to a variable that will not resolve. I had spent years persuaded that the future is made by the people who intend it — that if you want to know how the world will be reorganized, you find the engineers who are reorganizing it on purpose and you watch their hands. Rogan is the counter-case. He is the man who built a thing with more weekly reach than most of the platforms I had been reporting on, and built it without a plan, without a credential, without a single gatekeeper's permission, and without, on the evidence, ever quite meaning to.

I expected, going in, to be writing a media-strategy story — a story about a deal, an algorithm, a platform. The record gave me something harder. The record, in his case, is enormous and almost entirely public: every episode he has ever recorded is available to listen to, the press coverage runs to a small library, and the man has talked, on a microphone, for something on the order of sixteen thousand hours, which is its own kind of memoir. Working from that archive, and from the court and press material that surrounds the parts of his life he has been less willing to narrate, I kept finding the story somewhere other than where I had left it. Not in the deal. In the boy who had been moved through three American states before he was twelve and had decided that the only thing that traveled with him was his own body.

What I found was not the operator the media-strategy story wanted. I found a watchfulness that never switched off — the hyperalertness of the perpetually new kid, monetized at a scale no one had modeled. I found a continuity between the man on the microphone and the man off it that is genuinely rare at that altitude of fame. And I found the controversies exactly where the critics say they are: the pandemic episodes, the misinformation, the Spotify years and what they cost. I have tried to render those without flattening them, because the honest difficulty of this subject is that the strongest case against his method and the strongest case for it come out of the same three hours of unedited tape.

That difficulty is why he is worth a book. Rogan is the clearest case study I know of how authority actually moved in this century — not through the institutions I had been watching but around them, into a strip-mall studio in Texas, on terms no one licensed and no one can now revoke. I spent years reporting on the people who were designing the future. It took a man who insists he designed nothing to show me how much of it arrives unplanned.

— Daniel Asher, London

Chapter 1 · The Boy Who Moved

He was born in Newark on the eleventh of August, 1967, the summer the riots ended and the city emptied. His mother was Irish-Italian. His father, Joseph Rogan Senior, was a cop, a Newark police officer whose patrol districts had included some of the wards that were still smoldering from five days of civil unrest that had ended about three weeks before the child's birth. Newark's 1967 riots had killed twenty-six people and wounded more than seven hundred, and had set the city's white middle class streaming toward the suburbs in a sustained demographic evacuation that took the tax base with it. Joseph Rogan Senior was one of the men whose daily work was the impossible project of maintaining institutional authority in a city whose population had just watched that authority use clubs and gunfire against it. The marriage lasted long enough to give the child a name and a face and very little else. Joseph James Rogan was five years old when his father walked out. He would tell interviewers, decades later, that he had no relationship with the man and that the absence was a fact he had stopped examining sometime in his teens. When pressed he would offer a flat sentence that closed the subject down. "All I know about him is that none of his friends ever had anything good to say about him."

What the father had been outside the house, a police officer in a city the city was leaving, with a cop's daily exposure to the city's worst hours, did not, on the record Rogan has provided, enter the story he tells about himself. He has not offered the father's police career as context or excuse. He has offered almost no narrative at all. The father is the closed file. The father walked out. The boy was five. Whatever followed is not material the man has chosen to share.

The mother remarried. The new husband's name was not Rogan (she took a different surname in the second marriage), and the boy was, by his own much-later accounting, largely a bystander to the domestic rearrangement that the second marriage imposed. The family's geography in this period traces an arc across the American working-class diaspora of the late 1960s and 1970s. They moved first to Gainesville, Florida, not the university side of Gainesville but the rest of the city, the working neighborhoods away from the University of Florida campus, the parts of the Florida interior where the heat was simply a condition and the people had come from elsewhere. The boy attended school in Gainesville through the elementary years before the family moved again, this time north to Newton, Massachusetts, the leafy western suburb of Boston with its ivy-walled high school and its assumption that everyone's father was a lawyer or an academic. Joe's stepfather in the Newton years was, by Joe's later accounting, a gentle man who was kind to the boy in ways the biological father had never been. He built Joe a heavy bag in the basement. He drove to weekend tournaments. He paid the rent on a modest house in one of Newton's less expensive neighborhoods. The household held the brittle quality of every second marriage with a child from the first. Joe was the addition, Joe was the proof of what had failed before. But the stepfather was, in Joe's public retellings, genuinely trying. The biological father, the Newark cop who had walked out when Joe was five, received no such credit. He received almost no mention at all.

The Newark-to-Gainesville-to-Newton move took up the years between five and thirteen. Three states by the time he was a teenager. Each relocation meant new schools, new social hierarchies to decode, new accents to absorb or resist. The Florida interlude is the least documented of the three residences in any published biographical source. No Gainesville school records have been cited, no neighborhood accounts have surfaced. What it gave him was the experience of being doubly new: first new in Florida, then new again in Massachusetts. The child who has been relocated twice in the years when social bonds are first being formed learns a particular lesson. The lesson is not that places are dangerous. The lesson is that places are temporary and that the social investments that belong to permanent residents are not available to the child who arrived last year and may be gone by next year.

He was small for his age. Pale. Quiet in a way that was easily read as shy and was actually closer to watchful. The Newton schools were full of boys who had grown up together since kindergarten, whose fathers played squash with each other, whose mothers ran the same parent committees. Joe Rogan watched them. He learned where the lines were drawn and how to stand on the side of the line that did not get noticed. He was not bullied so much as overlooked, which is a slower kind of damage and harder to name.

Newton South High School, where he completed his secondary education, was and is one of the most academically competitive public high schools in New England, a school whose alumni include politicians, academics, and executives, whose college-placement statistics are posted annually in the local press, and whose social culture assumed, with the comfortable certainty of an institution that had been right about itself for decades, that the boys and girls in its classrooms were going to go on to professional careers in law, medicine, and engineering. Rogan was not on that track. He was on the track that ran parallel to that track and did not intersect with it: the track of the kid who showed up, did the minimum that kept him in the building, and spent his genuine energy somewhere else entirely.

Before the family reached Newton, there had been Florida. Gainesville. Sun and palm trees and a different kind of school, full of children whose accents he could not place and whose social systems were arranged on principles unfamiliar to a boy whose life had started in a New Jersey city. He was the new kid twice in the years a child can least afford to be it. Some children adapt. Some develop the chameleon's gift, the easy assimilation, the quick reading of the room. Joe Rogan developed neither. What he developed instead was a quieter and more lasting condition, which was the sense that places were temporary and that the people in them owed him nothing, and that whatever protections existed in the world he would have to build for himself out of materials he had not yet identified.

The boy's life from this period is sparsely documented. There are no Gainesville yearbook photos that have surfaced in any biographical source. The Florida years end without ceremony when the family moves north to Newton, where Joe will finish middle school and high school and where the rest of the story properly begins. But the Florida interlude matters because it taught him the lesson that the rest of his life is a response to. Friends are not permanent. Cities are not permanent. Fathers are not permanent. Names are not permanent. The only thing the boy could think to keep was his body, which traveled with him from state to state, and which, at thirteen, when he discovered what could be done with it, became the first thing in his life that had stayed.

The biographical material here is thin because Rogan himself has been thin on it. He has spoken in podcasts about being bullied, about an incident in junior high that he describes as the moment he realized he could not protect himself, which the next chapter will treat in detail, but he has been protective of the family material in a way that is unusual for a man who has talked, on a microphone, for sixteen thousand hours. The mother is named warmly when she comes up. The stepfather is praised in passing. The biological father is the redacted name, the closed file, the spaceshaped exactly like a refusal. Whatever the man did or did not do, his absence is the shape into which Joe Rogan poured a life. The life is the cast of the absence.

What you can say with certainty, from the documentary record and the man's own scattered telling, is this. By the time he was twelve years old he had lived in three states, he had been assigned a stepfather's surname, and he had a measured, alert, slightly defended way of carrying himself that suggested he had already learned not to expect things to last. He had not yet found the dojo. He had not yet found stand-up. He had not yet found the microphone or the cage or the friends with podcasts. He had only the one thing that he would carry into all of those rooms, which was a refusal to be moved without his consent, and a body that was about to start training, every day, for years, in the only system he had ever been able to make stay still long enough to learn.

The question the rest of the life keeps answering is whether a kid that watchful can ever stop being the kid that watchful. The answer, on the evidence of the next fifty years, is no. He builds a media empire on watchfulness. He builds a comedy career on watchfulness. He calls fights for a living because watchfulness is the job. The hyperalert child of the Newark-to-Gainesville-to-Newton triangle does not grow out of his hypervigilance. He monetizes it. He turns it, eventually, into the most listened-to broadcast in the world. But that is forty-five years away, and at thirteen he does not know any of it. At thirteen all he knows is that there is a small storefront dojo on a side street in a town outside Boston, and that it is taught by a Korean man with a fourth-degree black belt and a way of explaining things that makes the boy listen, and that for the first time in his life he has walked into a room where the rules were the rules whether he was new or old, and where the body he had inherited from a father he did not know was, for an hour at a time, the only thing in the room that mattered.

What also deserves noting, in the biographical context of his Newark origin, is the particular quality of the city's relationship to policing in the year of his birth, and the way that relationship shadowed the domestic life he grew up in without his ever making it explicit. His father was a Newark police officer in July 1967, in the department that had been on the line during five days of the most significant civil unrest in New Jersey's history. The domestic consequences of that professional exposure are not documented and not something Rogan has discussed in any public record. What the biographical record does show is a man who, at every stage of his adult career, has maintained a complex and skeptical relationship to institutional authority in general and to the authority of law enforcement in particular, a relationship that combines a working-class respect for the practical functions of policing with a deep and persistent suspicion of the institutional culture that justifies police overreach. That skepticism has appeared on the show in discussions of drug policy, in conversations about mass incarceration, in his recurring willingness to platform figures whose primary critique is of the American justice system's treatment of poor people and non-white people. Whether the skepticism has any biographical connection to the father who was a Newark cop in 1967 is not something the evidence can establish. It is something the evidence suggests as worth noticing.

The Newark he was born into in August 1967 was a city in the late stages of a long catastrophe. The riots of July 1967, five days of confrontation between the Newark police and Black residents that left twenty-six dead, more than seven hundred wounded, and a political wound in the city's institutions that did not close for decades, had ended about three weeks before his birth. The city his father policed, and that his mother would soon pack the family away from, was in the process of becoming one of the most famous examples of twentieth-century American urban decline. The tax base was leaving. The population was leaving. The schools were underfunded. The streets were dangerous in ways that the Newark of 1967 had not yet fully admitted to itself. The boy born there in August 1967, to a police officer who would soon leave his family and a working-class woman who would soon leave the city, inherited nothing from Newark except the birth certificate that made it the first line of every biography.

Newark, in the years immediately after the riots, was experiencing one of the most rapid demographic transformations of any American city in the postwar period. The white Catholic and Jewish working-class neighborhoods that had constituted the city's tax and population base were evacuating at a pace that city planners had not anticipated and that the remaining institutions (the schools, the hospitals, the police department that Joseph Rogan Senior served) could not absorb the consequences of. The Newark Police Department of the late 1960s was an institution navigating, in compressed time, the consequences of using force against the community it was meant to serve. The officers who had been on duty during the July 1967 unrest were working, in the months after the riots, in a precinct culture that had been altered by those five days in ways that would not be clearly understood for another decade. Whether Joe Rogan Senior was among the officers who had been on duty during the riots, or whether his work took him elsewhere in those months, is not a matter of public record. What the record shows is that he remained a Newark police officer through the years after the riots and that the marriage produced a child in August 1967 and that the child was Joseph James Rogan and that the police officer was gone when the child was five years old. The reasons for the departure, like the father himself, have been closed from the record by the consistent silence the son has maintained about them for fifty years.

He signed up at thirteen. The mother paid. The lessons began. The boy who had been moved went, on his own legs, to the place where being moved would no longer be something done to him but something he would learn to do, very precisely, at speed, to other people. It is not too much to say that the rest of his life begins on the night of his first class, in a small room with mats on the floor, with a man bowing to him and waiting for the bow back.

The dojo was, in the chronology, the first thing he chose for himself. The relocations had been chosen for him — by the father's departure, by the mother's remarriage, by the stepfather's employment situation. The schools had been chosen by geography. The suburbs had been chosen by the arithmetic of rent and commute. The dojo was his. He found it, he has said, by asking around, by asking a kid at Newton South where people trained, by following the answer to a small school on a side street in the Newton area that offered Taekwondo classes in the evenings for a monthly fee his mother could manage. He walked in alone. The instructor, a Korean man with a fourth-degree black belt, assessed the thin, watchful boy and told him what the first month would cost. The mother paid. The boy bowed. The work began.

The Newton of his high school years was, in the social geography of greater Boston, a particular kind of suburb — the suburb that had absorbed the children and grandchildren of the Jewish intellectual emigration from Boston proper, combined with a heavy Irish-Catholic professional class, combined with a smaller contingent of families who had come from the working-class side of both communities and who occupied the neighborhood's less expensive corners. Newton South High School, where he enrolled, was the school that one side of that geography attended. Newton North was the school the other side attended, depending on address. Newton South's alumni records list politicians and academics and writers and executives in numbers that reflect the concentrated ambition of the families who had moved to the suburb to put their children in that building.

Rogan was not in that demographic. He was the stepchild of a working-class household that had landed in Newton by a sequence of relocations that had started in Newark and passed through Gainesville and that had given him, by the time he was old enough for high school, a particular relationship to institutional aspiration. He could see what it looked like from inside a very good example of it, but the aspiration did not belong to him and he was not pretending it did. He was, in his own retrospective accounting, largely invisible to the social structure of the school. He was not a threat to it. He was not an aspiration of it. He was a kid who trained after school and had friends at the dojo and who would, when asked, tell you that he planned to teach martial arts for a living. The school did not know what to do with him. He did not require the school to know. He had already found the room he needed.