Joe Rogan Elected Trump, So Does He Get Credit for James Talarico Too?

In the fall of 2024, Donald Trump sat down with Joe Rogan for three hours, Rogan endorsed him the day before the election, and on election night Dana White stood at the victory party and thanked "the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan" by name. Trump later said the interview reached 300 million people, which is roughly everybody in the country plus a few people who were only in the room to use the bathroom. For a good while after that, a lot of folks on the left decided Joe Rogan had personally elected the President of the United States, the way you decide it was the dog who ate the pie because the dog is the only one who won't argue.

Well, I have news, and the left is not going to enjoy it. In July of 2025, a Texas state representative named James Talarico went on The Joe Rogan Experience. He thought the invitation email was a phishing scam, which is the most relatable thing a politician has ever done. They talked for hours about faith and the Ten Commandments in schools, and at the end Rogan told him, "You need to run for president," and added that we need someone who's actually a good person. Last Tuesday, Talarico beat Ken Paxton for a U.S. Senate seat, the first Democrat to win one in Texas since 1988.

So I'd like to know when the thank-you card goes out. If a podcast can be blamed for one election, it ought to be allowed to take a bow for the other. You can't tell a man his barbecue gave the whole town food poisoning and then, when the next batch wins the county fair, say it was mostly the weather. Talarico's people will tell you he won on economics and on Paxton's scandals, and they're probably right. But the Trump people said the same kind of thing about their candidate, and nobody listened to them either. Either the microphone is a kingmaker or it's a microphone. It can't be a kingmaker only on the years you lose.

Which brings me to the other famous Rogan guest, Elon Musk, who came on in September of 2018 and smoked what a government form would call a marijuana cigarette, mixed with tobacco, on camera, while running a car company. Tesla's stock fell the next morning, and two months later NASA, which was counting on SpaceX to fly its astronauts, ordered a workplace safety review of the company that cost five million dollars. That clip is the one everybody remembers. It's the one that made him sound like a fellow who'd sell you a timeshare on Mars.

What nobody remembers is what he said in the same interview. He told Rogan that artificial intelligence was dangerous, that he'd spent years trying to get people to slow it down and regulate it, and that the effort had been futile. In 2023 he signed a famous open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments. A few months later he started his own AI company, xAI, and today his chatbot Grok is in your phone whether you invited it or not. He's now the poster child for the thing he warned us about, which is a bit like the fire marshal opening a fireworks store, and putting the store inside the firehouse, and then running for mayor on a platform of fire safety.

I don't say he was wrong. I just notice that the warning came with a joint, and the product came with a press release, and people believed the press release. That's the trouble with going on a podcast for three hours: you say everything, and everyone keeps only the part that agrees with them. Rogan elected Trump if you're angry, Rogan had nothing to do with Talarico if you're happy, and Musk was a stoner until he was a visionary.

The lesson, as near as I can figure, is that a microphone only ever gets the blame. Nobody has yet thanked a microphone for anything, except Dana White, and he was thanking it for winning.