LRN No. 40: my evening with Joe Rogan
Plus: the oldest shirt in the world
My first book came out in 2020 into a world with no bookshops, no book launch parties, no book signings and no book tours. (I have mentioned this before - I’m clearly still getting over it.)
I had spent the best part of five years working on this book. It was about sex robots, lab grown meat, babies gestated in bags and euthanasia machines, for goodness sake. I wanted everyone to know about it. I wanted to shout about it from every possible rooftop. (Shouting from actual rooftops was one of the few things that wasn’t illegal in 2020.)
That’s how I came to be filling in the contact form on the website of The Joe Rogan Experience. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote - I was sitting on my stairs trying to stop my toddler from riding her tricycle down them into the building site at the bottom of them - but I explained who I was, what my book was about, how I thought Joe might like it, and how I’d love to send him a copy.
An email came about a week later. Was I free on Tuesday evening to speak to Joe?
It was barely one line, from a Gmail account. It didn’t feel like a real invitation to be on the biggest podcast in the world. But what did I have to lose if I said yes? So I did.
On Tuesday evening, I tried to artfully arrange copies of my book on the shelf in the only corner of my flat that wasn’t a building site, sat myself in front of my robot poster, booted up Skype, and waited to see if this was actually a very strange joke.
But it was not.
The next two hours and fifteen minutes were among the most bonkers in my life. Joe had clearly not read my book, or the two-page summary of it that I’d sent to the mysterious Gmail account, but that didn’t matter at all, because he just wanted to chat about stuff: the philosophical implications of downloading human consciousness, the ubiquity of lip fillers, how being able to listen is a superpower, whether it would ever be possible to clone a headless cow and make it walk on a treadmill…
I guess I should have expected this. But how can you expect any of that?
Joe wasn’t anti-vax back then - there was no vax to be anti-yet. It was a simpler time, when Twitter was still Twitter, Musk was moderate, and people were baking sourdough and hoarding toilet paper. Being Joe’s guest didn’t feel particularly controversial then. He was known for being the host of the biggest podcast in the world, and that was it - a host with weird guests and boundless curiosity.
And I absolutely loved every moment of it. It was one of the most interesting, most surreal, most thought-provoking conversations I have ever had. I felt high as a kite for hours after I closed my laptop. I was never really sure that it had actually happened, until the episode came out.
I only found out that it had been released when I picked up my phone to find thousands - literally, thousands - of Twitter notifications a few weeks later. I hadn’t really appreciated just how big of a deal this podcast was, and is.
I’m sharing this because I think people believe there must be mysterious forces at work behind these kinds of interviews - my publicist must have got in touch with Joe’s booker and thrashed out the details long in advance, with paperwork and contracts and wardrobe and make up - but it really was just Joe taking a punt on someone who filled in the form on his site who sounded interesting. Sometimes things really are quite simple.
On YouTube, people didn’t like my episode, because they didn’t like the lighting in Joe’s new studio. I am still smarting from the fact that I never got to fly to Austin to see the bad lighting for myself.
Not much has caught my eyes and ears over the past few weeks because I have been watching The Traitors am on the judging panel of some awards and have to spend hours watching submissions. But still:
was delighted to discover the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, which is free, and stuffed to the gills with Ancient Jewellery, sarcophaguses, and the oldest shirt in the world, apparently
(I know about the Petrie Museum because of the Opinionated Guide to London Museums which I gave my husband for Christmas and then quietly pinched for myself because it’s brilliant - all the guides in the series are)
enjoyed the devilishly well made Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action docs on Netflix
reread Hadley Freeman’s extraordinary interview with Tony Slattery from 2019. Moving and hilarious and beautifully written. Poor Tony Slattery.