I genuinely can’t remember the last time I watched an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast.
I do remember watching it, I won’t say religiously but still quite a lot, while I was doing my DPhil at Oxford. Back then, in the halcyon days of 2016 and 2017, Joe and his guests were a welcome relief from all the reading and thinking I was doing about the Reformation, church music, Puritans, Archbishop Laud, Star Chamber and the causes of the English Civil War.
For all its faults, and as silly as it might sound now, the JRE really did feel like something a bit—dare I say it?—radical. It was certainly different and refreshing. Two dudes just sitting down and speaking their minds, with little concern for the niceties of political correctness. Jordan Peterson talking about the evils of compelled speech and Bill C-16 in Canada, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, dominance hierarchies and, of course, lobsters. Alex Jones plugging in to the tenth dimension and dropping mind-bending truth bombs about the elites and their quest for transcendence, living forever and the secrets of the universe. I think I remember that entire monologue from start to finish.
But in the decade or so since, I won’t lie I’ve grown pretty tired of all the stuff about DMT machine-elves, what would happen if you shaved a chimpanzee and tried to wrestle with it, and teenage political takes like can’t we all just be nice to each other, get along and offer amnesty to millions of illegals who just want to grill like the rest of us? I guess it’s impossible to keep a format fresh for more than a decade and to continue saying new and interesting things, especially when hundreds of millions of Spotify dollars are in the offing.
Then came last Friday, and for the first time in years, I was excited about Joe Rogan. His guest was Calley Means, a former advisor to Health Secretary RFK Jr.
Means sensationally quit two weeks before the midterms, but said nothing beyond some boilerplate about how grateful he was for the opportunity and how much respect he had for President Trump and Secretary Kennedy.
“The past two years have seen historic policy and cultural change to confront the chronic disease crisis and healthcare incentives that profit from us being sick,” he said in his official statement.
“This movement is in the first inning and just getting started.”
Of course that wasn’t the whole story. A fool could see. Means wasn’t happy to be leaving less than two years into the great crusade to Make America Healthy Again. No way.
As I reported at the time of his resignation, officials in the Trump admin told Politico that Means was frustrated about “what he saw as a lack of progress on MAHA priorities.”
The “breaking point” was apparently a cancelled meeting about a new definition of ultraprocessed foods. Means had been hoping an established definition for ultraprocessed foods would pave the way to regulate many food additives that are associated with the chronic disease epidemic in America.
If you’re a devoted reader of my work, you’ll know the US food supply is almost uniquely awful, because of an insane loophole called Generally Recognized as Safe, which allows food makers to create a new ingredient, decide that it’s safe and introduce it to the food supply without even telling the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Like I said, insane. What’s even worse is that companies have been doing this since about 1958. As a result, nobody knows how many ingredients there are in the US food supply. Estimates suggest at least 10,000, and we simply have to take the word of the companies that produce these secret substances that they’re not making us fat, depressed, autistic, killing all the good bacteria in our guts and giving us rare forms of ass cancer. Studies, however, are increasingly telling us that these substances are indeed making us fat, depressed, autistic, killing all the good bacteria in our guts and giving us rare forms of ass cancer.
Means was also furious, like so many MAHA people including myself, about President Trump’s Executive Order on glyphosate, back in February. That Order made the supply of glyphosate, a pesticide whose harmful effects Secretary Kennedy has campaigned for years to highlight, a national-security issue. In doing so, the Order also offered immunity to manufacturers, just as a huge wave of lawsuits linking the chemical to cancer and other illnesses was about to break all over them.
So on Friday night I sat down with a glass of homemade kvass and a steaming hot plate of oxtail lasagna, buried beneath a mound of parmesan large enough to rival the EU’s famous cheese mountain, and watched the whole of JRE 2578 from start to finish.
It didn’t disappoint. Means’ central claim was that a cabal of top officials, led by chief of staff Susie Wiles, had systematically plotted and schemed to subvert the MAHA agenda from day one, January 20, 2025. They colluded with industry representatives and even foreign governments to make sure the flagship policy promises—vaccines, food additives, ultraprocessed foods, pesticides—were never honored, enriching themselves in the process. For the most part, Means said, both the President and Secretary Kennedy were simply unaware of how badly they were being played until it was too late.
“There is a very concentrated group of people in the Trump administration that are antagonistic to what people voted for,” Means told Rogan.
