Hey Joe

Today I will try, for what I believe is the third time, to discuss Joe Rogan. I don't know what my problem is but I can guess at possibilities, such as: 1) it's not that interesting a topic. This is the most psychologically flattering option, because it feels good to dismiss Joe Rogan as unimportant. Diminishing and dismissing celebrities seems to be common practice, because, my Wiccan Magick tells me, it is unfair that a small group of people gets most of the attention, and a good way out of that is to deny that there is any sort of meritocracy to celebrity. In other words, everyone who is famous just lucked into it, or is kind of a Kim Kardashian (undeservedly famous). Another possible reason I have for avoiding adding my JR piece to the pre-existing glut is 2) it's embarrassing to talk about him because I want to be too cool for celebrity worship. As always, self awareness is the way out -- stay one step ahead of the psychologists, and you're golden. You can like pro wrestling if and only if you realize it's fake but stay for the sophisticated performance art.

There is reason to be cynical about fame. In a way, celebrities are all Kim Kardashians, including Joe Rogan. If this were not the case -- if fame just meant you did your job so well that everyone appreciated it -- there would be tons of famous accountants and programmers and so on, and not just athletes and professional word-sayers and face-makers like comedians, podcasters, and actors. There has to be some kind of "I wanna be that" or cool or glamorous element that you don't see in most trades; I only know one famous plumber, also Joe, and he's not famous for his plumbing. Basically what makes people cool in high school (good looks, good at sports, social butterfly) are what lead to celebrity; it doesn't usually matter if you're good at debate or hovercraft building.

There is also reason not to be so cynical. Kim K has style and sex appeal and wealth, so people want to be her and/or rub up on her. The "famous for being famous" thing is a little unfair; she wasn't just launched randomly into the spotlight -- she has attributes, man. Admittedly things snowballed for her in concert with Paris Hilton, whose celebrity was also a bit questionable in the same way, but also, not really when you think about it: a narrative was easily built around Paris Hilton's lifestyle and personal style and general style, and people liked and literally bought that narrative; the mass media market doesn't lie, except during tax season. I suppose the worst of the worst in terms of undeserving celebrity might be the UK royal family, although they would probably defend themselves by saying that they don't actually want to be celebrities. There's possibly some luck or happenstance to fame but I think that is at best a component to the formula; if you have ability or a giant ass, luck helps propel you and it into stardom. If you just have a normal ass then luck won't get you anywhere.

I wanted to be a star. I want to be a star. I was raised to believe I was a star. I was told I was special, with special talents. I did drawings and showed my mommy and she marveled at my dinosaurs, and later acrylics of a crushed Pepsi can and fruit in a bowl and a fellow student seated on a stool in her college sweatshirt. I'll never know how good I actually am at music, writing, and art. Maybe I'm a middling talent who never really developed those talents. Maybe I tried but couldn't. I dunno. But I have this burden of creative enterprise, that combines with being an only child, that combines with some autistic or narcissistic or bipolar mental attributes. I'm definitely "a creative," or "a ponytail," as the Hacker's Dictionary calls us. I'm not famous, so how good can I be?

Artists often want to be stars. In contemporary art departments, like I was in, there's a lot of clandestine hunger for exactly the same flavor of fame Hollywood actors are going for, but people don't say it out loud because of institutionalized disdain for capitalism, and the mainstream, and especially their juncture. There's even some crossover; I think Brad Pitt is making art objects now and they say they're good. As soon as someone makes money they are cast out of importance in the eyes of contemporary academic art. I remember people shitting on Warhol a lot in my department.

I always fantasized, approximately, that I was somehow on the edge of fame for my output, and that it was just a matter of "being discovered." I know it doesn't work that way, usually. Joe Rogan is actually a good counterexample because he is a hard worker. I am lazy. He talks about people like me, and seems to know people like me. He despises me for being lazy, and for being weak. He says he has the urge to pick on people like me -- people who complain and blame the world for their failure rather than "grinding," like he does (working hard and persistently or almost obsessively).

I used to smoke a lot of pot, just like Joe Rogan, and I could get delusional under the influence. Lots of non-plans to be rich and successful with strange enterprises like building nonprofit hospitals. I got high and fantasized about being the UFC heavyweight champion of the world, having started training at age 45 and discovering heretofore unheard of prodigy, in spite of a lifetime of clumsiness and sloth. I dreamed of ways of being a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience, and landed on traumatic brain injury as my most reliable "in," since Joe had talked about it in the context of combat sports. Later I realized how funny this was: "Today's guest is a guy with brain damage." I considered presenting myself as "Loser Joe Rogan," and being interviewed as such, as in, "look -- I'm just like you in that we share interests and hobbies and attributes, but I failed utterly. Isn't that fascinating?"

Here are some of those interests and hobbies and attributes. First of all, Joe Rogan used to draw a lot. That was his thing before Taekwondo. I, too, drew a lot, or at least was good at it. In fact I think probably I did not work as hard at it as Joe did, but I am just naturally better at it. You can kind of tell by looking at Rogan's drawings that they are overworked and not well "initialized" -- he does a lot of shading and coloring and makes a lot of marks, going over and over what is not a great design or representation to begin with (lots of 3-D and anatomical mistakes with jaws and arms and so on). So you can kind of see his quality of mind ("I grind, man") coming out in his artwork, and at the same time this serves as a caveat against that cherished American aphorism that hard work is the only thing that matters. A friend once got angry when I threatened to praise her child for some inherent attribute; instead, I was to assure him only that he had worked very hard.

Joe Rogan grinded (ground?) at Taekwondo and got really good. In fact he was the Massachusetts state champion, four years in a row. I also studied Taekwondo, and I worked hard at it too. But I couldn't fight, although I was awarded the belt before black ("Dan Bo," or red belt black stripe). All I could do was ballet dance, basically -- do fancy high spinning kicks and slap my foot against a pad. Students sparred some but not often, and I never hit hard or was hit hard. I used to think all this was the fault of my school and I still do to a degree (See: McDojo'ism), but I now also think that Taekwondo schools in the 90s catered to a wide range of students, including those who just weren't good at hurting people, or were disinclined to do so. For us, there were forms and drills and weird little sparring dances that didn't mean much in terms of training for a fight. JR is compelling to me in part because he can beat almost anyone up, whereas I was bullied but was always too scared to fight back, but I'm pretty big so no one wanted to risk actually provoking me past a certain point, I suppose. The result of that is I am an easy target (insert fat joke): a big guy who is also a pussy. It's sad.

Then there's podcasting. Joe Rogan has been doing his since 2009, and I've been doing mine since 2015. It's 2022 now. I used to do interviews, just like he does, but it was too hard to find guests so I gave that up, even though people remarked I had a talent for it. I wanted my enterprise to be easy. I didn't grind.

There are many similarities between Mr. Rogan and MJT but there are also many differences, such as 1) he smokes pot and MJT does not. In fact MJT renounced it recently and thinks it's bad. 2) Mr. Rogan secretly wants to learn guitar but is afraid to start because he believes his tendency to grind would then take hours away from more important things like working out, family, etc (maybe this could be my "in" on the JRE: give Joe a live guitar lesson). 3) MJT is not a stand up comedian but only tried it once in junior high school as part of a "speech and drama" class.

It might be helpful vis-a-vis comedy to do the 'observing alien' thought experiment: what would this alien note? Comedians are basically saying things that take audiences by surprise because they are somehow transgressive of contemporary culture. I think that's comedy in a nutshell. I used to think Rogie's standup was better than I think it is now, and I believe that is in part the nature of stand up comedy: it does not age well, and might be aging more quickly now as culture changes more quickly [citation needed]. Watch the sets of Steve Martin, or even (gasp) the great Richard Pryor: my experience is that they are not only not funny, but are not even trying to be funny. I think this is a manifestation of the culture-dependency of comedy -- what is funny to people changes according to the hive mind. All this is complicated by the fact that I'm a little bit depressive or at least anhedonic, and I just don't laugh that much, especially when watching stand up comedy (or podcasts starring supposed comedians).

I think the kind of celebrity worship I questionably engage in now but never used to, at all, has come out of the "internetification" of entertainment media: because it's on MYYYY computer on MYYYY youtube and I can pause and play and skip, plus the fact that I have been making internet media since fucking 2001 and it never went anywhere, in spite of it being in the exact same browser as the Joe Rogan Experience and in fact utilizing the exact same pixels...because of all this I feel weirdly closer to Joe than I would have, had Joe only appeared on one of the TV channels I surfed occasionally for a few minutes back when we had cable. No, instead Joe is a guest on my Mac, an object I've been typing and clicking and creating on since I was 11.

I see myself in Joe Rogan and I see Joe Rogan in myself. It's said that the connectedness most of us experience, to varying degrees, between ourselves and other people, is the essential component substance of human society. But it might be a house of cards -- our brains tell us that we are everyone and everyone is us, but in fact everyone is an island; brains do their own thinking and don't transmit any signals over the air. This is sort of the opposite of what most spiritual systems impart when they tell us that we are all one. I say no, it just seems that way because that's built in to make a more cohesive tribe, but in fact we're all ultimately ranting and raving in our own little worlds. Not only do we all die alone, but we're all alone now.

Bros online see Joe Rogan as the consummate alpha male: he can fight, he appears to have no social anxiety, and he's married with two kids now but is known or at least rumored to have had lots of ladies before that. Plus he's a centimillionaire. He has confidence that appears to come out of hard work. A lot of people are cynical about Joe, including me, but this is probably a defense mechanism and it's hard to argue against working hard, then succeeding because of this, and feeling better about yourself and your social status as a final result. Joe says he used to be a loser before Taekwondo. Many or most of us never have that transformative experience.

I did it -- I wrote about Joe Rogan. He famously says he doesn't read anything people write about him, and "doesn't read the (social media) comments." Maybe a year ago I read a sort of hit piece on him, of which there have been several. But this one had kind of an ironic postmodern multifaceted tone such that you couldn't quite tell if the writer admired or disdained Rogan. I think this supposed ambiguity was an intentional cover up and in fact the writer was jealous, like me. And the thing is, these snivelling writers -- like me -- who write about Joe Rogan, are trying to own him in some way; they're trying to encapsulate him and define him and psychoanalyze him in such a way that it makes him feel small, or would make him feel small, if only he read the comments. If you want to fight Joe Rogan you have to do it on his terms: talk to him one on one, where you will lose. Or, fight him actually with strikes and wrestling and submissions, where you will also lose. Smarmy smirking internet pieces mean nothing to him. It's an enviable position.