Cigars, whiskey, algorithms, and Joe Rogan

I wrote this for a publication I won’t name, but I didn’t like the editorial direction they wanted to take. So, I’m throwing it here. Maybe this will get me back in the habit of publishing things for all you lovely subscribers.

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The YouTube algorithm really wanted me to watch clips of Joe Rogan’s podcast. I felt baffled and insulted. The promise of the algorithm has been that it leads you in the direction of your interests, and here YouTube was telling me that I was not, as I had hoped, a modern renaissance man with an intense passion for literature, art, and philosophy, but rather the kind of guy who might find the prospect of watching the former host of Fear Factor prattle on alongside pseudo-intellectual provocateurs like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro for three hours enticing. My self-esteem took a major hit. 

But when the lightbulb went on as to why YouTube might think of me as a potential Rogan fan, it all made sense, even if the rationale was also disheartening. Sometime in 2019 I started to get really into bourbon. It had been my spirit of choice for a few years, satisfying my taste for sweets and forging a deeper connection to my southern roots, and I had decided I wanted to make it part of my adult personality to be someone with a deep knowledge of whiskey. I hoped it would make me more interesting. In addition to reading online lists and reviews you might find at places like Uproxxx, Gear Patrol, or Esquire, I turned to YouTube and found a whole world of personalities recording their reactions and tasting notes for the latest whiskey releases—functionally the adult equivalent of those kids unboxing toys. They served as a guide to discovery, purchase, and chase, as I watched hours upon hours of their reviews and blind tastings that would help hone my own palate and discern what was worth my time and what was all hype.

Then, in the fall of 2020, with months of the COVID-19 pandemic behind us but still no inkling it may be safe to gather again, I started smoking cigars. I had been introduced to cigars nearly a decade earlier, when a chance encounter on a Brooklyn sidewalk with the owner of a website I was freelancing for led him to treat me to dinner and then a cigar at the now closed Diamante’s in Fort Greene. I hadn’t considered that cigar smoking might be something I would enjoy, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I did, and would over the next few years find myself venturing out on occasion to one of the few remaining cigar lounges in the city to have a smoke. With lots of extra time on my hands as the pandemic roiled, I sought out cigars as a form of relaxation and anxiety management, and became a near daily smoker. And once again, I turned to YouTube to learn more about my new interest. 

The more I clicked on whiskey and cigar content, the more the algorithm tried to provide me with content it felt was compatible with my new consumption habits—first it was knives, then guns, and finally Joe Rogan. 

I have no interest in knives, guns, or Joe Rogan. I just wanted to learn about whiskey and cigars. But what all those things have in common is that, in our society deeply committed to a gender binary in all things, they are decidedly male. Of course, there are women and non-binary people who are into all of the above, but within the fuzzy definition of American manhood, cigars and whiskey have occupied a prominent place. It has been true since before the Spanish colonized what is now Cuba, when the Taino people rolled up the native tobacco leaves and smoked them, that it was a predominantly male pastime, and in the late 1800s more than half of American men smoked cigars. And ever since the clear spirits revolution of the 1960s, when vodka became the drink of choice for young people rejecting their parent’s cultural habits, drinking whiskey has been seen as the province of older men (though that has changed some as the “bourbon boom” has taken hold in the last fifteen or so years). 

I can’t deny that part of the appeal of these pastimes is the kind of masculine cool they portend. When I light up a cigar, hold it between my index and middle fingers, pull toward my mouth and draw in the smoke, I imagine it looking like a scene out of a movie where someone like Humphrey Bogart or Denzel Washington holds court over a captivated audience. This may not be the exact fantasy of every cigar smoker, but talk to any number of those who frequent lounges or smoke alongside friends and you’ll find that part of the thing they relish is the coming together, the conversation, they chance to relax and be themselves—for the men to be men. Enter Joe Rogan. 

“It’s the kind of conversation that happens over cigars and drinks all the time,” begins the September/October 2021 Cigar Aficionado cover story on Rogan. It’s hard to tell if they actually sat down with Rogan or not, as most of the quotes appear to be pulled from his show. Regardless, the “good life magazine for men” wrote up a few thousand rather flowery words about him, his podcast, and his relationship to cigars and whiskey. Because he had shouted out the company, Nicholas Melillo, founder of Foundation Cigars, sent Rogan two custom hand-painted boxes of his brands’ cigars. One of them featured Rogan as a Nicaraguan shaman. 

Buffalo Trace, the hugely popular bourbon brand, allowed Rogan to select his own barrel of bourbon, that would then be bottled with his insignia printed on it, gifted to Rogan to have for himself and podcast guests. A single barrel produces over two hundred bottles. 

If you’re a business that wants to reach a large audience, it makes sense to partner with someone who reaches some eleven million people every month. But even I, a writer with zero business sense, know that marketing is not just about the number of people you reach, but the kind of people you reach. You want your product in the line of view of people who are mostly likely to buy it, and in this case, by putting their products in front of Joe Rogan fans, Foundation and Buffalo Trace seem to have said that the people most likely to enjoy their products are people are OK with a white comedian who has regularly said the n-word. These are people who will listen to Joe Rogan say: 

“We walk into Planet of the Apes. We walked into Africa, dude. We walked in the door and there was no white people. There was no white people. Planet of the Apes didn’t take place in Africa. That was a racist thing for me to say.”

And continue to listen. They are people who are OK with Rogan repeating racist and damaging stereotypes of the Asian American “model minority,” as when he said: 

“Their mindset is to just work really hard. It’s not to protest things and not to shut things down….The Asians, the whole reason why they kick ass, is because they don’t spend any time on petty bullshit.” 

Joe Rogan listeners—and thus, perhaps, Buffalo Trace drinkers and Foundation smokers—are the type to not push when Rogan spends months spreading misinformation about COVID-19, the vaccine, and ultimately convinces one of the NFL’s marquee names to listen to his steps for “immunization” rather than actual doctor’s who say to get vaccinated. 

This is why I don’t enjoy cigar lounges, because the kind of “conversation” that happens on Rogan’s show is precisely the conversation that happens there, and most places where largely men gather. And subsequently, the cigars and whiskey that get consumed come to be associated with this kind of conversation. And then, when I want to dive deeper into the culture of my vices, YouTube suggests I watch Joe Rogan, leader of disaffected men convinced they are the last gasps of masculinity holding the country together. 

But I was never under threat of becoming a Joe Rogan listener. When YouTube started suggesting him to me, I knew who he was, I was aware enough about what he stood for, that I knew there wasn’t going to be anything in these three hour conversations that I needed to hear. That Rogan and I both share a love of cigars and bourbon is not nearly enough for me to hear him out. 

For some other guy, though, it may be. It probably is. There is some other guy, discovering whiskey or cigars, searching for more info on YouTube, coming across some Joe Rogan clips, and sitting for hours listening because, hey, this guy likes what he likes. He’ll want to listen to Rogan talk to Mike Tyson, or Russell Brand, or Kevin Hart, or Robert Downey Jr. Then he’ll listen to the episodes with Sam Harris, or Alex Jones, or Elon Musk. And soon enough, he’ll hear Rogan say something like:

“Transgender people, it’s clearly a real thing … It’s existed throughout history. There’s always been people like that…What [author] Douglas Murray was saying is that some of them [in contemporary society] aren’t really that. They’re just latching onto this need to get attention, or to be special, to stand out, to be a victim.”

And to that guy, smoking his cigar and sipping his bourbon, it won’t sound like anything more than just men being men.