Joe Rogan: gig-economy übermensch

Whether you’re pro or anti Rogan, if you are a gig-economy hustler you’ve got to admire the way he’s long avoided wage slavery and more recently transcended cancellability

If it’s relevant (spoiler alert: it isn’t), I’m an unabashed Joe Rogan fan.

But, rest assured, this isn’t the gazillionth hot take arguing that the world’s most popular podcaster is either a heroic dissident speaking truth to corrupt media and political elites (the hard-bitten Gen X position) or a racist and transphobic anti-vaxxer misleading those biddable ‘low-information voters’ who tragically fail to understand legacy media journalists, politicians and multinational corporations always have their best interests at heart (a worldview that’s prompted an unlikely woke Millennial-grumpy Boomer coalition).     

No, I simply want to analyse Rogan’s inspiring ability to, firstly, avoid getting trapped in employee roles and, secondly, ensure nobody can take away his livelihood.

Rogan’s CV

After a hard-scrabble, peripatetic childhood, Rogan’s briefly pursued a career as a fighter, taught martial arts and half-heartedly attended university in his late teens and early twenties.

At age 21, he began pursuing a career in stand-up comedy. It’s unclear if he was aware of it at the time – it was back in the pre-Internet-mob Before Times – but Rogan has often noted that one advantage of being a comedian is that, if you’re funny, it’s difficult for anyone to prevent you earning a living. (Comedians from Lenny Bruce onwards have delighted in outraging the pearl-clutchers on both the Right and Left. Neither the conservative épatered bourgeoisie in the past nor the progressive scolds in recent years have had notable success ending those the careers of those they regard as beyond the pale.)

As is standard, Rogan made little money in the early years of his comedy career and supported himself by doing what would today be described as low-level gig-economy work, such as doing paper runs, driving limousines and working as a security guard at a concert venue.

His career started to take off when he got a supporting role in the sitcom NewsRadio in his late twenties. At this point, Rogan was no longer living hand to mouth, but he was a long way off having fuck-you money. He acquired that by hosting the reality TV show Fear Factor from 2001-2006.

TV shows tend to be all-consuming, and the decade Rogan spent on NewsRadio then Fear Factor was the closest he came to operating like a salaried employee. Nonetheless, even during this period, he continued to perform in comedy clubs periodically and also started working as a colour commentator at UFC fights. After Fear Factor wrapped, Rogan threw himself back into stand-up comedy and ramped up his UFC commentating work. In late 2009, he started a weekly podcast, which consisted of him and a fellow comedian “sitting in front of laptops bullshitting”.

Rogan claims – and there is no reason to disbelieve him – that the podcast was a lark and he never expected it to attract a large audience or generate any significant revenue. For the first five or so years of its existence, the Joe Rogan Experience lived up to its creator’s low expectations of it.

In 2015, it started to take off and Rogan started began making some serious live read and YouTube advertising coin. Famously, in mid-2020 he signed what was reported to be a US$100 million licensing deal with Spotify.

A modern-day Horatio Alger story    

As even his harshest critics would probably concede, Rogan’s life story contains a lot of valuable lessons for anybody who wants to be successful. Briefly, those lessons are:

*Take risks most other people aren’t prepared to take

*Work extremely hard while also blocking out some time for friends, family and fun activities so you don’t burn out

*Be open to receiving and acting on feedback, but also willing to stand up for what you believe in

*Have enough self-belief to cope with the plentiful failures entrepreneurial types inevitably endure while simultaneously preventing your ego from running out of control

How to be master of your fate

Rogan has always aimed to be what would today be termed uncancellable. To put it another way, he’s striven to win at the gig economy by making sure he always has multiple clients, a range of different income streams and a skill set that ensures that he can keep working even if he antagonises powerful individuals and institutions.

Consider how Rogan differs from both the average wage slave and the average freelancer/contractor.

Most employees can be fired – or at least subjected to hellish treatment until they have no choice other than to resign – if they displease a single individual located higher in the org chart than them. Despite decades of HR puffery about respectful workplaces, this is by no means an uncommon occurrence.

Those operating at the arse end of the gig economy aren’t in a much better position than employees. It’s not entirely true that you get to be your own boss working as, say, an Uber driver. Every customer who gets in your car is temporarily your boss. If you get a bad customer-service rating from enough of those customer-bosses, you’ll be robo-fired by the Uber algorithm.

It’s not until you get to rarefied heights of the gig economy occupied by those with a rare skill set that you start to see anything approaching real income security. If you are, say, a competent full-stack developer you’re unlikely to have any trouble finding freelance work or a contractor role. Even if you’re difficult to work with, your clients will be inclined to accommodate you. If they aren’t, well, there are plenty of other buyers in the market for what you’re selling. A full-stack developer may or may not use platforms such as Upwork to find gigs. But, unlike the aforementioned Uber driver, they aren’t likely to be significantly impacted if they are kicked off these platforms.  

In light of the above, let’s analyse Rogan’s resumé.

In 1988 he went into an industry with lots of potential clients. Clients who rarely enforce an industry-wide ban on a ‘difficult’ service provider.

It’s not uncommon for comedians to be barred from performing at certain establishments. (Rogan himself was banned for six years from what’s arguably the most important comedy club in the world.) But a comedian banned in one club in the US can almost always still perform in tens of other comedy clubs in their state, hundreds across their country and thousands across the English-speaking world. Few comedy club owners will refuse to work with a comic who puts on bums on seats. Even if they’ve been Me Tooed, have abrasively left-wing or right-wing views, are in the depths of an out-of-control drug addiction, or are just plain insane.   

The cautionary tale of Milo

Like most industries, comedy has been digitally disrupted.

On the plus side, that means comedians are even less beholden to their traditional clients – comedy club bookers and owners – than before. (Especially after the pandemic made performing in public difficult, many comedians started podcasts. Plenty more began releasing sketches, or even entire specials online.)    

The catch is that’s digital disruption has handed the likes of YouTube, Twitter and Netflix a great deal of gatekeeping power. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the rapid rise and even more abrupt fall of Jewish-Catholic, gay-then-straight, Greek-British-American right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos achieved a Roganesque level of cultural prominence circa 2015. Milo, who leaned heavily into the acid-tongued queen stereotype, was banned from Twitter in 2016 following some particularly vicious tweets. His career immediately went into a death spiral. He was subsequently cancelled by his book publisher and Facebook and went broke. Nowadays, he’s attempting to pray the gay away while trying to keep afloat financially by flogging religious kitsch on a home-shopping network.)      

Deplatforming the platforms

Rogan interviewed Yiannopoulos several times at the height of his fame and often points to his fate as an example of what can happen to those who get on the wrong side of powerful platforms.

In the years before his Spotify deal, the career-killing, revenue-blocking power of Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube’s hyper-liberal commissars was a matter of more than just abstract interest for Rogan. He not infrequently had episodes featuring controversial guests or heterodox ideas demonetised and possibly shadow banned by YouTube. Rogan might have been the world’s most popular podcaster, capable of capturing the attention of millions of eyeballs for nine hours (3 x three-hour podcasts) every week. Nonetheless, YouTube’s actions sent a clear message that he needed them much more than they needed him.

Instead of just complaining bitterly about YouTube’s capriciousness and censoriousness – the standard response of podcasters to this day – Rogan found another platform and made sure it had 100 million reasons not to punish him if he had the unmitigated gall to leap out of the Overton Window.  

Be like the unaverage Joe  

At the time of writing, Rogan is taking heavy fire from the legacy media outlets and political actors that have long resented him. Spotify hasn’t yet cut him loose, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens soon. (In 2019, NBC couldn’t pay out Megyn Kelly’s US$69 million contract fast enough after she wandered into the modern-day minefield of racially appropriate Halloween costumes.)

Rogan’s already been offered another US$100 million deal to move his podcast to a platform backed by Peter Thiel. Even in a worst-case scenario where no media company CEO was willing to risk the staff unrest and dinner party opprobrium that a licensing deal with Rogan would entail, he could simply create a website to put his podcasts on then ask fans to make subscription payments and/or go back to spruiking sex toys.  

The point is that Rogan’s current employer needs Rogan much more than he needs them. That’s exactly the kind of client-provider power dynamic every sensible freelancer and contractor ducking and weaving in the gig economy should be aspiring to.  

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