Joe Rogan and Louis C.K. Talk 9/11, Alex Jones and ‘Mainstream Media’ in Their Meeting of the Minds
You couldn’t assemble a better brain trust of “guys from whom aimless 20-year-old male comedy fans borrow their entire worldview” than the tandem of Joe Rogan and Louis C.K. even if you had Jordan Peterson, Dave Chappelle and the character of Tyler Durden come to life in a podcasting room together.
On Saturday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular voice in podcasting had the most successful “canceled” comedian on to talk about the topics most important to Rogan’s contingency of fan – namely, the deceptive practices of the 24/7 news cycle, the tragic backstory of Alex Jones’ insanity, and C.K.’s account of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
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Finally, we have the experience of listening to your dad’s friends talk about society condensed into a single podcast episode.
The irony of Rogan complaining that the “mainstream media” is just one big ploy to get people to watch commercials when The Joe Rogan Experience, the most successful podcast in the medium’s history, has itself gone through phases of being a long form supplement commercial with a guest star was apparently lost on the prolific podcaster. C.K. told the story about the now deeply ironic episode of his FX sitcom Louie in which he appears on a Fox News talk show hosted by Greg Gutfeld to debate the merits of masturbation.
C.K. recalled the bizarre experience of witnessing the Fox News command station formulate a response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in real-time as Bill O’Reilly reacted with dramatic derision before Obama even finished talking. Rogan decried the entire industry as a “trick to get you to watch the Toyota commercial” – for context, here is a list of all of the JRE promo codes if you’re in the market for a new superfood or ball hair trimmer.
Rogan and C.K. briefly discussed the topic of controversial friends – one their own friends would have some thoughts on – when Rogan casually mentioned that the morally and financially bankrupt conspiracy theorist Alex Jones suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was a teenager, to which Rogan attributes his more litigable diatribes.
Rogan and Jones have a long history of friendship predating Jones’ highly publicized lawsuit regarding his defamatory claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings were a government hoax. Rogan told C.K. that his friend was subjected to violent bullying when he was in high school, including an incident where one of Jones’ tormentors picked him up and slammed him head first onto solid concrete. Said Rogan, “He was f—ed ever since then. And he has real mental problems sometimes. And if he’s drinking a lot and then he takes in too much conspiracy shit, he starts believing things that aren’t real.”
During the talk, C.K. told his “Where were you on 9/11?” story, explaining that, when he first received a call from his heavily pregnant wife while living in Brooklyn, his first thought was, “Am I in trouble?”
“This is a world problem, not a me problem,” C.K. thought when he finally turned on the TV. “I’m pretty sure that’s not my fault,” he joked. C.K. He recalled that, on the 11th, he had a sitcom pitch meeting scheduled with a large network. “I called the network and I assumed the meeting was canceled … they made me pitch a comedy on the 12th,” said C.K.
Rogan replied facetiously, “They gave you a day off.”
Tune in next time when these two discuss the finer points of, actually, just go ahead and do literally anything else.
