[[“value”:”
We may have found another reason why some men have such a hard time taking accountability.
Manosphere mouthpiece Joe Rogan proved to have a challenging time admitting he made a boo-boo on his podcast last week after he mistook an obviously fake AI video of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as real.
Rogan brought up the subject of Walz — who unsuccessfully ran with former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential campaign — an hour and 40 minutes into an episode while he was interviewing comedian Tim Dillon.
“You know what’s really fun? When someone is in that whole race and running for president or vice president, and then the race is over and they realize that person was a liability,” Rogan said. “So they cut them off and then that person goes wacky like Tim Walz.”
Rogan then went on to describe the bizarre AI-generated video of Walz that was shared by Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) on X late last month. In the video, a saucy AI-generated Walz wears a “Fuck Trump” shirt, dances and slaps his butt while riding down an escalator to the Pussycat Dolls’ 2005 hit “Don’t Cha.”
“If you were at the mall with your kids and this guy rolled down the escalator, you would call the cops and get him banned,” Riley wrote alongside the video, which now boasts a community note on X that states the video “is clearly AI.”
AFP Fact Check, a department of the international news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), also published a tweet on Sept. 4 that informed the public that “the clip is altered, with the Minnesota governor’s face superimposed on the body of a TikTok creator.”
Yet, it seems that Rogan had not seen the AFP’s fact check last week when he excitedly asked Dillon, “Have you seen this video?”
When Dillon said he hadn’t and immediately asked Rogan to “please play it,” the podcaster asked his producer, Jamie Vernon, to find the “weird” clip.
As Vernon pulled up the video, Dillon asked, “Is that really him?!”
“No, it’s not real,” Vernon said.
“It’s real.,” Rogan said.
“No, it’s not,” Vernon doubled-down.
“Yes, it is,” Rogan insisted.
“It’s AI-generated,” Vernon argued.
“No, no, no. It’s real,” Rogan shot back.
As the two continued to argue, Rogan eventually admitted, “I love it.”
“He slaps his ass. Definitely him. This is 100% real, Jamie — you’re a plant by the government,” Rogan said.
And at that, Vernon pointed out that it clearly states at the top of the video he was playing for Rogan that the footage was AI-generated.
“‘Riley Moore fell for an AI-generated video of Minnesota Gov–’ I fell for it too, and do you know why I fell for it?” Rogan asked before making a very telling statement.
“Because I believe that he’s capable of doing something that dumb.”
Rogan’s inability to admit he’s wrong because he feels like he should be right is emblematic of a fragile ego, at least according to a 2018 article published in Psychology Today.
According to the article, someone who has a hard time taking accountability for their mistakes do so because “to the outside world, they look as if they’re confidently standing their ground and not backing down, things we associate with strength.”
“But psychological rigidity is not a sign of strength, it is an indication of weakness,” the article says. “These people are not choosing to stand their ground; they’re compelled to do so in order to protect their fragile egos.”
Considering that men make up 80% of Rogan’s audience and that the highly-influential comedian is known for praising traits stereotypically associated with masculinity, like strength, it might explain why the kind of men who enjoy listening to Rogan’s podcast may also struggle to admit they’re wrong.
This is not the first time Vernon fact-checked Rogan, only for Rogan to fail to apologize. In 2023, he tried to prove that then-President Joe Biden was experiencing cognitive decline by attributing a pretty dumb thing President Donald Trump said to Biden. In the clip Rogan was trying to peddle, Biden seemed to claim that there were airports during the Revolutionary War. But when Vernon stepped in to show Rogan a longer cut of Biden’s remarks, it immediately became clear that Biden was making fun of Trump for saying that years prior. Vernon went on to play a video of Trump giving a speech in 2019 in which he said that Revolutionary military forces “took over airports.”
“Oh, OK, so he fucked up,” Rogan said of Trump after watching his speech, and laughed it off.
Rogan’s guest for the episode, MMA fighter Bo Nickal, took it one step further in trying to deflect from Rogan’s mistake.
“That’s the thing about media these days,” Nickal said. “It’s like, you gotta look into it.”
Yet — considering the remarks he made about Walz just last week — it seems Rogan decided not to take that advice.
“]]