“Experience” as the Best Teacher
Joe Rogan, Bourgeois Skepticism, and Knowing Reality
May 16, 2025
A CURIOUS EXCHANGE took place in August 2024 between interviewer and podcaster Joe Rogan and Hollywood actor Russell Crowe. Crowe had visited the set of The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) for what would become a meandering three-hour conversation.1Russell Crowe, “#2191–Russell Crowe,” interview with Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Experience, podcast audio, August 20, 2024. Such lengthy one-on-one chats are typical for JRE, although notably unusual in the world of celebrity interviews—which, before the rise of the podcast format, were generally presented to audiences as heavily edited snippets crammed in between television commercials.
In the course of confessing himself to be starstruck by Crowe, Rogan begins to describe another recent occasion on which he had been similarly impressed by stardom. “I met [Hollywood actor] Dennis Quaid the other day! Same thing, I was like, ‘Oh! That’s Dennis Quaid!” “Cool,” Crowe replies neutrally, not encouraging any further elaboration. But Rogan goes on, “It just seems so strange!” Crowe quietly grunts. “Hunh… Yeah,” his smile fades for a moment and the light, easy energy between him and his interlocutor briefly dims before Crowe goes on to change the subject.
A faux pas has been committed but Rogan, with his wide eyes and guileless, upbeat manner, seems wholly unaware. Crowe has had to make a split-second determination about whether or not Rogan actually intended to lob a bomb right at the beginning of their conversation by bringing up, of all people, Dennis Quaid. Could Rogan, who makes his living conducting celebrity interviews of this type, really not have recalled that Crowe, actress Meg Ryan, and her then-husband Quaid had been caught up in a love triangle splashed across early 2000s tabloid headlines for the better part of a year?
But there sits Rogan across the table from him, friendly, smiling, and seemingly still starstruck. One imagines many ways Crowe might respond to the provocation, be it unwitting or otherwise. He lets it go, seeming to have concluded that this is no act, and that Joe Rogan is just what he presents himself to be—a guy who doesn’t know very much.
The Joe Rogan Experience
In terms of 2025 audience share, JRE is the world’s most successful and popular podcast, drawing nearly twenty million subscribers on YouTube alone and consistently ranking #1 among listeners on Spotify, with whom Rogan signed a deal last year rumored to be worth $250 million.2Reggie Ugwu, “Joe Rogan Renews at Spotify, But Will No Longer Be Exclusive,” New York Times, February 2, 2024. Originally a stand-up comedian by trade, Rogan made his name as a fixture of early 2000s popular culture, hosting the reality television show Fear Factor and providing commentary for the then relatively new mixed martial arts promotion company Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
But today, Rogan is best known for having risen to the top of a crowded field to become America’s single most-listened-to podcast by quite a wide margin. This alone makes Rogan’s role in shaping public discourse important to analyze, understand, and make sense of, since Rogan does not simply make jokes and entertain.
His approach to his interviewees, and to the topics they discuss, presents a mode of rational inquiry that he regularly articulates as a rational ideal. We may reasonably expect it to play a significant role in shaping public consciousness and especially public conceptions of what does and does not count as reasonable grounds for belief.
Among the considerations that make Rogan’s success remarkable is that he does not have any traditional journalistic experience or training and does not exhibit certain skills typically associated with professional interviewing. Famously (or infamously), he only very rarely presses guests with difficult or hard-hitting questions.
It’s not unusual for Rogan to ask hardly any follow-up questions at all, allowing even the most outlandish and unsupported claims to go unchallenged. He does not always seem to be in “control” of the interview, often seeming instead to acquiesce to the agenda of his guest. It is not always clear how thoroughly Rogan has researched his guests before speaking with them on the show.
And yet at least some of Rogan’s shortcomings as an interviewer also appear to be his strengths. Guests are allowed to relax, get comfortable, and talk—and boy do they talk, with three-hour interviews being hardly unusual on JRE and his longest, an August 2020 interview with comedian Duncan Russell, clocking in at over five hours. In these conversations, Rogan himself is generally (though not uniformly) soft-spoken, witty, curious, cordial, and keen to give his guests what he and they will both consider to be a fair hearing.
In the parlance of twenty-first century popular culture, it may be fair to say that Rogan does not so much “interview” his guests—who span a wide range from Bernie Sanders to Candace Owens and from Steve Bannon to Cornel West—as platform them. For his many millions of listeners, the JRE podcast serves as a kind of ersatz public square in which a wide array of prominent and influential figures all get to have their say in an intimate and congenial setting.
Rogan’s own views are notoriously hard to pin down and often hard to predict unless he deigns to make them explicit, as he sometimes does. To the casual viewer, they certainly do not appear to flow from any consistent set of core values, presuppositions, or ideas aside from a commitment to keeping an “open mind.” Rogan has described himself as “left-leaning,” a description that might come as some surprise given his chummy hobnobbing with notoriously right-wing figures such as Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump.
That his willingness to listen to these people—and what’s much more, to platform them—bears the social meaning that he has thereby affiliated himself with them and their ideas is, argues Rogan, only evidence of the authoritarian character of what he decries as “wokeness.” It is generally in these moments, while he is bemoaning what he refers to as left-wing “purity tests,” that Rogan most clearly expresses common cause with the far right.
The ground of that common cause is professed not primarily to be the (frequently racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise generally noxious) content of far right ideas, but rather a form of rational inquiry which has come to be readily recognizable as the calling card of the far right: “just asking questions.” The goal, ostensibly, is not to proclaim one’s own certainty but simply to undermine and discredit that of others. In this way, the Right is presented as tolerant, inquisitive, and open-minded while Rogan’s and many of his guests’ characterizations of the Left typically paint it as dogmatic, unquestioning, and inflexibly set in its ways.
Rogan models for his audience a form of skepticism that manifests as a permanent condition of detached, abstract contemplation.
Rogan models for his audience a form of skepticism that manifests as a permanent condition of detached, abstract contemplation, blithely maintaining an “open mind” even when faced with the most absurd, repugnant, or unlikely propositions. In seeking to avoid premature conclusions, he often seems to avoid reaching any conclusions, at all.
For example, he has famously continued to treat as a still-open question whether the drug Ivermectin cures Covid–19—this, in spite of scientific consensus that it does not. On JRE, taking oneself to have arrived at knowledge—even, or perhaps especially, by way of hard-won scientific consensus—is generally treated as a failure of rational inquiry, rather than one of its goals.
If the conspiracy theories Rogan “open-mindedly” entertains are about what an anonymous “they” (maybe the government, maybe the “woke mob”) want you to believe, then it’s also fair to ask what Rogan and his right-wing guests would prefer that listeners did not believe, and what values, aside from the “open mind,” he might prefer they did not commit themselves to. Indeed, while his often-unassuming manner and his skepticism of “elite” expertise have led Rogan to be viewed as an everyman, populist figure, the model of rational inquiry he inhabits and projects is a variety of thoroughly bourgeois skepticism and intellectual eclecticism.
It “open-mindedly” places its thumb on the scales of JRE heavily in favor of the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Any suspicion that these figures might themselves be in the sway of motivated reasoning, and not paragons of dispassionate and disinterested pure abstract reason, is curiously absent as Rogan and they congratulate one another on the courageous openness of their minds.
While there is certainly value to be found in this rotation of powerful voices on and off the soapbox JRE provides, one of the effects of Rogan’s performance of skepticism is to raise the evidentiary threshold for rational belief to a level hardly any proposition can reach. This produces a “leveling” effect such that competing claims are often treated as equally viable regardless of how highly the evidence might be stacked on one side as opposed to the other.
This tendency is one of bourgeois ‘eclecticism,’ inclined to classify any type of systematic thought as ‘absolutism,’ ‘dogmatism,’ or ‘theology.’
While Rogan is regularly described as a “contrarian,” the real animating principle of his model of rational inquiry is hostility toward all attempts to produce shared, coherent, and internally consistent worldviews. Marxists in the past have described this tendency as one of bourgeois “eclecticism,” a perspective which, as philosopher George Novack notes in his 1975 Marxism Versus Pragmatism, is “inclined to classify any type of systematic thought under the heading of ‘absolutism,’ ‘dogmatism,’ or ‘theology.’”3George Novack, Marxism Versus Pragmatism (New York: Pathfinder Press,1975), 273.
The skeptical and empiricist philosophy of David Hume, and especially his arguments which seem to undermine belief in causation, are an important historical precursor to this present-day pseudo-populist skepticism, although its influence appears on JRE in no doubt highly degenerated form.
Rogan’s Skeptical Forebearers
Hume’s 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a locus classicus for bourgeois skepticism of the type on display in JRE. Although a thorough treatment of Hume’s arguments would demand more space than can be given them in the course of this discussion, it remains nonetheless useful to review some of his most significant ideas briefly here.
Hume raises a skeptical challenge to the notion that we can claim to know or observe causation—either in the external world or even in what seems to us like the power of our will to move our own bodies. He argues that as knowers, we are only entitled to claim certainty about the content of our empirical “sense-impressions” of the world.
Where attempts at scientific theories of the world might posit an array of forces, powers, causes, and laws governing the behavior of things in it, Hume argues that what we observe when we perceive the world is, strictly speaking, only a series of discrete and potentially disconnected events. Even if there really were causal connections among these events, we would not be able to perceive cause—only the sounds, colors, smells, and so on associated with each of a series of minutely brief events. We do not, Hume argues, perceive through our sense-perception of empirical reality any causal mechanisms giving rise to necessary connections among various phenomenal appearances. And so, for all we know, these connections might not be there.
In the absence of a theory of causation, or even any way to ascertain that causation is a feature of the external world, one loses standing to make scientific predictions about the future based on one’s awareness of the present and the past. Even if a similar series of events has always occurred in the same way and in the same order in all past experience, there is no necessary connection to be detected which organizes those events into a single process to be identified, studied, and understood.
Therefore, regardless of how consistently one observes similar series of events occurring over and over again, when attempting to achieve certain knowledge, one is never licensed to make scientific predictions about what event may follow a procession of events just like those one has observed a thousand times before. Hume writes:
Upon the whole, there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connexon, which is conceivable by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined but never connected. And as we can have no idea of anything, which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be, that we have no idea of connexon or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings, or common life.4David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 54.
In taking Hume’s skepticism about causation to its most extreme conclusions, one would then arrive at the view that our ability to derive conclusions about the enduring nature of reality based on our observations of the world is severely hamstrung.
If Hume is right about causation, then no matter how many discrete, individual sense-impressions we gather, we get no closer to identifying any objective features of the external world that connect these snapshots of reality together into a unified process which develops historically according to laws of development that can be studied and applied. In fact, strictly speaking, if Hume is right then we’d have to consider that there might not be any “objects” at all, at least not of the kind that could be said to have a particular past, present, and future—only “loose and separate” series of conjoined but disconnected events.
We have taken this brief excursion into the history of philosophy not to suggest that there is some unbroken line of descent between David Hume and Joe Rogan—surely not, and not least of all because such a mapping would have to trace a line of development passing through New Atheism, medical quackery, simple grift, and an unsavory grab bag of conspiracist far right delusions. That said, when projected as the core epistemic value of the most commercially successful podcast in history—and when shared, echoed, and reinforced by his most powerful guests who also happen to be some of the most powerful people on Planet Earth—it is important to consider seriously the idea that Rogan’s “open-mindedness” may be more than just a fortuitously marketable quirk of his “everyman” persona.
The affected populism in Rogan’s hostility to certainty and expertise only just barely conceals a theory of knowledge and existence that ruling classes have adapted and embraced historically as an ideological bulwark against left-wing claims to know the world and to make reliable predictions about what kinds of interventions into the world promote the wellbeing of humanity. One illustrative example of how such skepticism is put to the use of resisting leftist conclusions is to be found in John Stuart Mill’s 1848 Principles of Political Economy.
There, Mill writes, “the question of socialism is not, as generally stated by Socialists, a question of flying to the sole refuge against the evils which now bear down humanity, but a mere question of comparative advantages, which futurity must determine.”5John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London: John W. Parker, West Strand, 1848), Book II, Chapter I, Section 3. In other words, Mill is arguing, socialists might claim to know how capitalism will develop, but they don’t. On this view, no one can say based on the present or past state of things whether capitalism has an essential nature which prevents it from bringing about “that multiform development of human nature” which Mill also hopes will arise in the future.
Mill’s skepticism is obviously not nearly so thoroughgoing as the view Hume presents a century before him in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Yet, it provides an example of the connection between denying that the world is knowable in a way that licenses us to make predictions about the future which guide our action in the present and erecting a bulwark against at least certain aspects of socialist thought—namely, its theory of history.
Rogan, of course, is no John Stuart Mill; neither are any of his guests. But even to be worthy of the kind of detached contemplation that viewpoints get on JRE, the plans and ideas of arch reactionaries like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, Peter Thiel, and the like all require the absolute minimum background assumption that, no matter how cartoonishly evil their designs, things might turn out all right in the end. For the appearance of rational inquiry to appear rational at all, the ideas Rogan’s guests float cannot be obviously guaranteed to spell misery and destruction.
And here is the value of a skepticism which cuts the tether between the things we do today and the future we get tomorrow. To evade critique and blame, these figures need the totally open future, the one whose possibilities are not at all conditioned and constrained by our actions in the present.
By contrast, Marx’s materialist conception of history holds that—rather than being a mere accidental succession of “loose,” “separate,” and disconnected events—the human species constitutes a single dynamic, internally differentiated, and ever-evolving unity. Or put differently, humanity is itself a process with laws of development which human beings can rationally derive from observation of—and active intervention into—our own development over time.
Rogan is known for resenting attempts to “pigeonhole” or categorize his political views, but it may be more accurate to say that he simply has an antipathy toward categories altogether, unless the Right gets to define and enforce conformity with those categories immediately legible within their (dogmatically held) preexisting worldview. Take this exchange between Rogan and Elon Musk, regarding left-wing moral criticism of the deliberate misgendering of transgender people:
Rogan: It’s so crazy…
Musk: It’s such bullshit!
Rogan: I mean, it’s just more evidence of the virus, though, right? It killed objectivity, it killed reality, and it demanded strict adherence, or you were attacked.
Musk: Yeah, any questioning of it would result in being ostracized.6Elon Musk, “#2281–Elon Musk,” interview with Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Experience, podcast audio, February 28, 2025.
This is—no pun intended—pretty rich coming from Rogan, who just a few months earlier yuks it up with his guest, J. D. Vance, as the then-vice presidential nominee fantasizes about using the power of the state to force the whole diverse array of human gender expression into two rigid categories:
Vance: Emmanuel Macron, who’s the leader of France, made this observation about… Somebody asked him, ‘Why hasn’t all the transgender stuff made its way into France?’ And Emmanuel Macron says, ‘Well, in France, we have two genders and that’s plenty.’ I kind of wish that was the attitude that we had in the United States of America.
Rogan: Well, have you ever heard Marc Andreesen break down why ‘woke’ is like a cult?
One has to ask whether it is really so strange that expressing these views might lead to ostracism from communities that respect the rights and dignity of trans and nonbinary people. In fact, it is not “wokeness,” “gender ideology,” or even the entire organized left as a whole that eventually forces every person to pick a side, for or against human emancipation.
Rogan’s real enemy—if I may be permitted to put it so dramatically—is history, itself. First, in the idea that our stores of past knowledge can guide us more or less reliably in the present as we both contemplate and actively produce our range of possible futures; second, in the concrete reality that, rather than an infinitely wide array of future compromises to be made, there is, as early twentieth century German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg famously put it, a stark and inevitable choice: socialism or barbarism.
Rogan’s real enemy—if I may be permitted to put it so dramatically—is history, itself.
The Left recognizes the crisis-ridden nature of capitalism as a global system which drives humanity inevitably toward this crossroads. It arrives at its conclusions through rational inquiry carried out as a shared, collective project of seeking to represent, in theory, a knowable, shared, and objective reality.
Its dire warnings are what Rogan, and the right-wing political ecosystem he platforms, can only hear and conceive of as unfounded, subjective, authoritarian, and self-regarding demands. This is due to the far right’s own ideological disconnection from, and hostility to, the impositions placed on them by concrete, objective reality. It is not some bogeyman called “woke,” but human history itself imposing that choice which Luxemburg names.
With his grab bag of centrist, “socially liberal,” and far right ideas, Rogan routinely flouts the notion that he might ever be made to choose a side. Nonetheless, he is clear that if pressed to choose, he would not choose socialism.
Of course, you have not read this far just for me to tell you that. But given the broad audience for his variety of bourgeois skepticism and eclecticism cloaked as the disinterested rational inquiry of the “everyman,” it is important to be clear that his perspective keeps an open mind about everything except working class demands to take humanity off its collision course with mass extinction.
Peter Thiel’s “Ridiculous Hypotheticals”
Joe Rogan and his guest, billionaire Peter Thiel, spend the first few minutes of JRE episode #2190 chatting amiably about Thiel’s indecision regarding whether to move away from California and, if he does, whether he should move to Florida or leave the country altogether. Thiel shares that the decision is complicated because, his frustrations with the United States notwithstanding, he’s arrived at the conclusion that it really is the best place on Earth and that in his view, the problems everywhere else are much worse.
Rogan keeps an open mind about everything except working-class demands to take humanity off its collision course with mass extinction.
Rogan asks Thiel to identify the problems he sees with the United States and Thiel demurs, claiming not to know what they are. Rogan insists that surely he must, before then putting the question to Thiel in a different way:
Rogan: Well, if you had supreme power—if Peter Thiel were the ruler of the world and he could fix this, what would you do?
Thiel: Man, I always find—I always find that hypothetical… it’s a ridiculous hypothetical, y’know?7Peter Theil, “#2190–Peter Thiel,” interview with Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Experience, podcast audio, August 16, 2024.
It’s worth noting that episode #2190 aired on August 16, 2024. Rogan does not press Thiel on whether the hypothetical really is so “ridiculous,” given that Thiel is a billionaire many times over, whose protege, J. D. Vance, happened to be the vice presidential nominee for a would-be administration that many already feared would rule in a dictatorial and authoritarian way.
Thiel continues to opine ominously about the “ridiculous hypothetical” future as though it were not one with clearly discernible harbingers and antecedents in the present:
I think my answers are probably all in the… you know… in the, in the very ‘libertarian’ direction. So, it would be sort of, figure out ways to have smaller governments… figure out ways you know, you know, to increase the age on Social Security… means-test social security, so not everyone gets it. Just figure out ways to gradually dial back, uh, you know, a lot of these government benefits. Umm… and then, you know… that’s insanely unpopular. That’s completely unrealistic on that level.
Thiel goes on to call Social Security “an intergenerational Ponzi scheme,” a remark anticipating statements Elon Musk has made in his capacity as director of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), effectively calling Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” With DOGE slashing Social Security’s workforce, Thiel’s idle daydream of “dialing back” government benefits over the objections of the masses has clearly turned out not to be so “unrealistic,” after all.
Later in their three-and-a-half-hour conversation (hours that somehow pass by with no mention of Thiel’s incredibly powerful defense contractor company, Palantir, or even his relationship to then-vice presidential nominee Vance), Thiel makes the striking claim that, “The fact that it’s called ‘climate science’ tells you it’s more dogmatic than anything that’s truly ‘science’ should be.” On this, Rogan does press him:
Rogan: But why does the fact that it’s called ‘climate science’ mean that it’s more dogmatic? Because if you said, ‘nuclear science,’ you wouldn’t question it.
Thiel: Yeah, but no one calls it ‘nuclear science.’ They call it ‘nuclear engineering,’ because… I’m just… the only, the only thing is… I’m just making…
Rogan: Well, is there any science that is legitimately science?
Thiel: Well, this point, people say computer science has warped, right? In the 1980s… All I’m saying is it was in the same categories as, let’s say, social science, political science… It was, it was a, it was a tell that the people doing it kind of deep down knew they weren’t doing real science.
Rogan: Well, there’s certainly ideology that’s connected to climate science.
Thiel goes on to describe what he takes to be the (in his view, wrongheaded) argument for critical thought which graduates from the mere assemblage of facts to develop theory which explains the facts and can function as a guide to action.
Thiel also presents what he apparently takes to be a reasonable skeptical counterargument to such claims regarding the power of scientific theory:
There’s an environmental project, which is, you know, and maybe… maybe it shouldn’t be scientific. There’s, you know, the hardcore environmentalist argument is we only have one planet, and we don’t have time to do science if we, if we have to do rigorous science. And [by the time] you can prove that we’re overheating, it’ll be too late. And so, if you’re a hardcore environmentalist you know you don’t want to have as high a standard of science. Yeah, my intuition is certainly when, when you go away from that you end up with things that are too dogmatic, too ideological. Maybe it doesn’t even work, even if the planet’s getting warmer!
Setting aside the question of whether Thiel’s scientific standards are “higher” or more “rigorous” than those of the international community of climate scientists, what we have here is simply a billionaire cynically undermining the validity of mountains of scientific research which has arrived at conclusions that are inconvenient for him. He attacks it on the basis that it doesn’t overcome his own subjective inclination not to believe its conclusions and secondly, because the scientists who carry it out are too “ideological,” which is to say, perhaps a bit too wedded to the future of Planet Earth.
And this is typical of the warped constellation of billionaire far right “freethinkers” and their hangers-on. No matter how iconoclastic, nondogmatic, nonideological, and fully unmoored from determining historical law they may purport to be, in their imaginings it is never they who can expect to bear the inconvenience of whatever “inconvenient truths” they insist on their freedom to disseminate and impose as a concrete reality onto society. This is so, even while today in March 2025, activist Mahmoud Khalil sits in an ICE detention center for the crime of daring to claim his right and entitlement to think and speak freely against the American and Israeli genocidal policy in Gaza.
Conclusion: Knowing Empathy
Rogan and his most powerful guests traffic in a variety of “freethinking” bourgeois skepticism that obscures its own material basis. It is grounded not in a politically neutral mental disposition of “open-mindedness” as an individual personality trait or mark of genius, but rather in the capitalist class’s hostility to those methods of inquiry which permit its own class character and the nature of its rule to be known.
We see this in Thiel’s criticisms of climate scientists’ “dogmatic” and “ideological” insistences that if capitalist production continues on as it has been, then climate catastrophe is our certain future. What Thiel demands is not freedom to think but rather freedom from critical thinking. It is a dogmatic, self-serving, and factually unsupported insistence that one of the options open to us is simply to continue on much as we have been indefinitely, in spite of the warnings.
We see this perhaps even more plainly in Elon Musk’s February 28, 2025, visit to JRE, during which Musk opined about how much better off “Western civilization” might be were it less empathetic to the plaintive cries of those who cannot survive its ravages. Here is Musk, floating the idea that Western civilization is only too kind to its victims: “We have suicidal empathy going on… The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization which is the empathy response. I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through… It’s weaponized empathy, is the issue.”
Musk did not offer further guidance about how to tell when empathy is “good” and when it is not, so we may have to do without his insight on that question. If one may hazard a guess, he seems more or less simply to think that empathy is good when it promotes the supremacy of “Western civilization” and bad—cynically “weaponized”—whenever the rendering of aid and fellowship to another human being undermines that supremacy in some way.
Musk floats this concept of “suicidal empathy” as though it were simply one among a dazzling parade of innovations to try on for size, like self-driving cars or commercial passenger space travel. Neither he nor Rogan appear to consider that after the transatlantic slave trade, the Trail of Tears, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and countless other horrors, we actually know a great deal now about how things turn out when “Western civilization” abandons human empathy in favor of brutally enforced economic, racial, and military supremacy.
The results are in, and this is one question which has already been answered. We do not need any further experiments in cold, unfeeling capitalist calculation in order to say with reasonable certainty how that all goes. We do not need any more exercises in brutal indifference to know it’s well past time to put an end to capitalism’s inhumane and irrational drive toward apocalypse. We do not need to visit those same horrors upon humanity again and again and again. ×
Notes & References
- Russell Crowe, “#2191–Russell Crowe,” interview with Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Experience, podcast audio, August 20, 2024.
- Reggie Ugwu, “Joe Rogan Renews at Spotify, But Will No Longer Be Exclusive,” New York Times, February 2, 2024.
- George Novack, Marxism Versus Pragmatism (New York: Pathfinder Press,1975), 273.
- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 54.
- John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London: John W. Parker, West Strand, 1848), Book II, Chapter I, Section 3.
- Elon Musk, “#2281–Elon Musk,” interview with Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Experience, podcast audio, February 28, 2025.
- Peter Theil, “#2190–Peter Thiel,” interview with Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Experience, podcast audio, August 16, 2024.