Comedian Marc Maron thinks he deserves at least some blame for making Joe Rogan one of the most powerful voices in America.
The host of the long-running (and soon-to-end) WTF podcast ruminated on what his show has “unleashed” since its inception in 2009 in his latest episode, including Rogan’s popular The Joe Rogan Experience, since he helped spawn “a format that can be used for dubious means, propaganda and pure evil,” he wrote in his newsletter.
He wrote in his newsletter, “‘WTF’ was there at the beginning of the podcast invasion,” and “The two people that revolutionized the podcast medium and unleashed its potential on the world were me and Rogan.”
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Just before the 2024 electon, the liberal podcaster called out his fellow comedians for using their podcasts to “humanize fascism,” when he wrote that they were “joking around” with “self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show” as if “they are just entertainers or even just politicians.”
Maron implied he was partially culpable for the success of Rogan, the most popular comedian turned podcaster on his latest episode Monday. “We weren’t the first, but in terms of making it a viable medium, we were certainly one of the OGs,” he said. “We changed the world, literally. We showed the world that it was possible to create a specific type of show on one’s own terms.”
“We helped unleash an exciting type of delivery system for pure self expression,” he continued. “Sadly, on some level, we also unleashed a format that can be used for dubious means, propaganda and pure evil. But hey, it’s not the atomic bomb.”
Rogan’s Joe Rogan Experience premiered just months after Maron’s WTF in 2009, but Rogan’s show became influential around 2016, when it grew to a million listeners per episode.
Notably, the rise in the conservative podcaster’s audience coincided with the first election of Donald Trump—even if Rogan did support Bernie Sanders in those days.
Rogan’s choice to have Trump on his podcast—and officially endorse him—last fall, while refusing to accommodate Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris, was a move many credited for Trump’s second election win.
Maron, on the other hand, is a fierce Trump detractor who regularly slams the president—including early on in his Monday episode when he blasted him for his “display of might and power with the new secret police that is ICE,” as the Los Angeles protests rage on.
“It’s just interesting to me, in the big picture of what’s happening and what this medium has unleashed, that me and Joe Rogan—we’re both in the system,” Maron said of Rogan, with whom he started doing stand-up at The Comedy Store in L.A. “Two ends of the spectrum of podcasting, coming from the same source... in a now truly apocalyptic landscape.”
