The Joe Rogan Experience review

The number one podcast in America is The Joe Rogan Experience. I started the new year listening to listening to Joe Rogan interview MMA fighter Gable Steveson. They talked about all the ways Gable is a tough dude and Joe Rogan demonstrated how cool of a guy he is to everyone by the appropriate "cool dude" mannerisms and words.After about two hours of discussing how tough and cool Gable, they start to talk about drug overdose deaths. Joe Rogan claimed that overdose deaths had skyrocketed in 2023 and 2024, but in 2025 the death rate did a big drop. He credited Trump for launching missiles at suspected drug boats in the ocean as reducing the overdose deaths. While he was talking, he put a graph on the screen to demonstrate his point. This is the graph:

I looked up the source of this graph. It comes from a peer reviewed article from the JAMA Network published by the American Medical Association. Link to the article here.The study plainly states it took place from January 2015 to October 2024. The explanation of the chart points out overdose deaths start to decline in 2023 and points out the decline gets steeper. It says, "This steeper decline continued through the most recent data point in October 2024." Joe Rogan's entire point that killing people in the ocean decreases overdose deaths is undermined by the fact that Joe Biden was president in 2024 and the U.S. government had not yet implemented a policy of murder on the high seas. My original thought was that Joe Rogan or his staff were maliciously lying because they got this chart from an academic journal, but my friend Elroy pointed out that this chart was probably being spread around without context before Joe Rogan spread it. Sure enough here is a sampling:

It turns out that when you bomb drug boats, American lives are saved.

God bless our military and go eff yourself media that defend the cartels. https://t.co/icdMbschQj

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) December 29, 2025

This post was on December 29, 2025 and Rogan's podcast was released on January 1, 2026. I suspect Rogan or someone on his staff got this chart with the misinterpretation from the right wing echo chamber. That is far more likely than one of them looking up an academic journal. Regardless of how they got it, it is clear that The Joe Rogan Experience is not a good place to get information. It's a bad podcast because it gets people who come to it to listen to an MMA fighter and then they get misinformation from someone they trust about a political issue, and most of them will never check the source. I give this podcast 0/5.